Two years ago, someone hacked into a University of East Anglia server and anonymously posted thousands of emails from climate scientists. Quickly dubbed "Climategate", global warming deniers jumped on this, trying to show that these scientists were engaging in fraudulent activities. However, it was clear to anyone familiar with how research is done that this was complete and utter bilge; the scientists were not trying to hide anything, were not trying to trick anyone, and were not trying to falsely exaggerate the dangers of climate change.

Climategate was widely denounced as a manufactured controversy, except, of course, by denialists. Because they denied it. That’s axiomatic.

However, like a bacterium festering away someplace dank and fetid, Climategate is poised to infect reality once again: The Guardian is reporting that a second cache of stolen emails has been released anonymously, and once again the cries of conspiracy are being heard. However, it looks like these emails aren’t really new, and were simply from the original stolen batch, but were held back until today. Mind you, the emails from the first Climategate were released right before a big climate conference, in an obvious attempt to derail it in the media. This new batch was released days before a similar conference, in what appears to be a similar propaganda move.

Climate change denial blogs picked up on this immediately of course. There are examples in the Guardian article linked above. But this is the usual hue and cry, with nothing really new. About all this supposedly new material Michael Mann said:

Mann called the new batch of emails "truly pathetic" and said they reflect desperation among climate deniers, who have failed to pick holes in the science. "They have instead turned to smear, innuendo, criminal hacking of websites, and leaking out-of-context snippets of personal emails in their effort to try to confuse the public about the science and thereby forestall any action to combat this critical threat."

It’s hard for me to argue against this, given what Dr. Mann has gone through the past few years. Attacked constantly, exonerated repeatedly, he knows the climate change denialist methods probably better than anyone.

This appears to be a carefully-timed attempt to reignite controversy over the science behind climate change when that science has been vindicated by three separate independent inquiries and number of studies – including, most recently, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature group.

None of this comes as a surprise to any of us who have been covering this for the past few years. I wonder, though, if the mainstream media have learned their lesson? Think Progress wonders the same thing.

So, with the Noise Machine ready to blast into full gear, let me be very, very clear:

The evidence is overwhelming, and no amount of noise will stop that. But that’s why the noise is made, to distract you. We are long past the time when this was simple skepticism — the open and honest questioning of evidence — and are now well into full-blown denial. This second release of emails is more evidence for that, especially given the timing.

And in some sectors that won’t make a difference — cough cough Fox News cough cough — because they are impervious to evidence. So if this doesn’t blow over immediately — as well it probably should — then expect to see a lot more of this:

Sitting at work, having to listen to right-wingnuts go on and on about how global warming is a lie and a conspiracy and being unable to speak a word of truth for fear of the vicious attacks that will follow; that’s what is hard. I wish they would just stop it!

Which is neither here nor there given the results have been replicated by many other scientists using various different methods, including in a study funded by the Koch brothers and run by a notable global warming denialist. So either these guys got really lucky to produce fraudulent science that happened to be correct, or, what seems more likely to me, they weren’t lying in the first place.

@rms #3:
Look outside the readme, sparky. We’ve already seen that the people promulgating the first batch of these mails are more than willing to quote mine. Check the original mail messages and you’d be surprised (though few of the rest of us would) at how mined these ones are.

Dan Moutal sums it up well: “The correct response to bad science, if that is what you are alleging, is more science, not stolen emails.” And we know what happened when more science was done (see: BEST).

Here’s the real scandal: Not only have the media not really reported on the exonerations, or on BEST, or on the mass of evidence… they have done no real investigation into who hacked the CRU and stole the e-mails in the first place. (Yet, a kid guesses Sarah Palin’s yahoo password and gets jail time.)

I haven’t delved into the Climategate controversy too much (can’t right now given my studies, and I don’t know if I want to even), but this is all expectable. Amazing how stubborn human attachment can get (even to the most inane and potentially dangerous of things), n’est-ce pas?

@1 Renee: Any chance your job would be at risk from these attacks, or is it just peer pressure?

Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get – and has to be well hidden. I’ve discussed this with the main funder (US Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.

The technical term for this sort of conversation would be “conspiracy.”

Folks should take note of the fact that several months ago, the CRU released all of the “climategate” raw temperature data that deniers had accused it of hiding.

The whole raw temperature data-set has been sitting on the CRU web-site for about four months now, just begging to be downloaded and analyzed. So have any of the deniers who had been screaming for the CRU’s raw data done anything with it? Have they published any of their own results demonstrating the UHI is real and that the global-warming trend has been exaggerated by “adjustments”? Of course not!

Now remember — it took the Muir Russel commission all of two days to perform its own independent analysis of the CRU raw data, and the MR commission’s results matched the CRU’s results. Performing a complete, independent check of the published global-warming results using the CRU raw data-set should require no more than a few man-days of a competent programmer/analyst’s effort. Just a few man-*days*.

But it has been nearly four *months* since the CRU released the data to the public; and in all those *months*, not a single denier out there has shown the willingness or ability to tackle a task that should take no more than a few *days*.

Basic problem is that all models are wrong – not got enough middle and low level clouds.

Giz! Is not that is what they mentioned in IPCC report? LOL

97% ‘Consensus’ Claim is only 75 Anonymous Self-Selected Climatologists. If you do climate as you do survey polls then predicting climate by Tarot cards is more scientific than what you do.

#2:
the only thing which stinks more is working with a gang of left liberal loons obsessed with global warming and homosexual lifestyle and hating every American who is not in complete agreement with them. And that is what you get if you got a postdoc position at US University.

But best attack “the right” rather than be objective and maybe do science, honestly is any science ever “settled.” First lesson of propaganda is when you are in the wrong attack the messenger.

Why does the hockey stick not show the little ice age? Or the Medieval warming? Why do they have to go to a new data collection method after 1960’s. What happened to all the original data? Why are we reducing the number of temperature stations around the globe if this is such a problem and why are the few remaining around cities that are know heat islands?

There are so many questions but the University that protected Pedophiles for years also protects scientific hacks like Mann. The are real issues with the Mann’s research and Phill trying to play white wash doesn’t help Science which he keeps claiming he cares about.

M. Mann:
I have been talking w/ folks in the states about finding an
investigative journalist to investigate and expose McIntyre, and his
thusfar unexplored connections with fossil fuel interests.Perhaps the
same needs to be done w/ this Keenan guy.

11. Conrad, you got it exactly, the tone and content are bad. Of course Michael Mann was exonerated by the same people who just got fired for lying and protecting Sandusky, or anyone or anything that threatens funding to them. My suggestion is that readers should pay attention to these emails and keep an open mind, don’t let activists make up your mind for you.

Davis #18,
You need to read more of Mann writings in media to respond to this particular point. I may partially agree with your generics and concede that *some* scientists do not claim to be impartial.Trofim Lysenko was a good example of one who did not pretend to be impartial.

Isn’t that what the Climategate leaker thought HE was doing to Michael Mann?

Seriously, say you have someone in your field who’s coming up with bizarre results that contradict established science (say, repeatedly finding that cigarettes are good for you) that are being used by an industry (cigarette makers) to shrug off health concerns. Wouldn’t you be the least bit interested in WHY this person is saying those things?

At Real Climate you can ask about the e-mail snippets and they will attempt to give some context: If anyone has any questions about anything they see that seems interesting, let us know in the comments and we’ll see if we can provide some context.

I may partially agree with your generics and concede that *some* scientists do not claim to be impartial.

You missed my point entirely. If you’re requiring that scientists as individuals be impartial, then you fundamentally misunderstand the scientific endeavor. Science itself is an impartial pursuit, but if the individual scientists were required to be impartial then no scientific field would ever progress.

Good point! “HE” was doing exactly that to Mann. But, “HE” is hardly a scientists involved in climate research. “HE” never claimed to be doing objective science to benefit humanity and does not expect that humanity trust his finding without verification. In fact I suspect that “HE” works for Putin’s FSB. Most Russian climate scientists believe in incoming Ice Age and I think that Russian government is sick and tired of climate initiatives led by US and UK.

Your second point is not as simple. Consider this: if the peer review process was hijacked by the small group including CRU team and Mann (as climategate emails indicate) then how would you expect skeptics to publish as many papers as the Team? If scientists act as political thugs, then will you expect them to give justice to the minority with whom they disagree. Hell, No! Again Trofim Lysenko comes to my mind.

Well, it’s nice to see the denialists come out in force and live up to expectations. A sympathetic group of scientists bought and paid for by conservatives comes to the conclusion that global warming is happening, and *still* the claim is that it’s all fake.

I’ve heard the claim that the term “denialist” isn’t fair. But what other term can you possibly use for someone who refuses to believe any fact that runs counter to their preconceived notions, even those facts delivered by individuals sympathetic to their cause…

Then again, maybe Richard Muller is now a SINO (Scientists In Name Only).

Funny that all the oil and coal companies in the world can’t put together an alternative climate model that works better than the models that our denialist friends are upset over. Many of those oil and coal companies don’t even deny the mainstream consensus, despite their strong economic interest in doing so. Why’s that? Our friend Count Nukem has a theory that it has something to do with homosexual lifestyles, but I’m not sure if that will be widely accepted.

I say let the truth come out. Climate science has unfortunately become a very partisan topic (such that even non-climate scientists, such as astronomers feel the need to take a side) and science does not fare well in a partisan environment.

To Phil in particular: as a non-climate scientist myself, I don’t have strong convictions here but I know that the data has shown a long-term warming trend over the course of the past few decades and I believe that a significant portion of that trend probably relates to increased CO₂ concentrations, which are most likely related to human activity. This is far from the only issue in climate science and perhaps not even the most important one (and further, many of the “skeptics” would accept this as well). That said, unless you believe that there are only 77 climate scientists in the world and this topic is the main area of disagreement there, citing the 97% figure is disingenuous and indicative of the dumbing down effect that partisanship has in those discussing this topic.

The problem is that there is a lot of selective skepticism and selective ignorance on this issue. I certainly include global warming “skeptics” in this as a good many of the lunk-headed comments on this topic come from those calling themselves “skeptics”. However, as this is Phil’s blog and he’s been wading into this topic several times, I would ask him to at least apply some rigor to his posts on this topic or don’t post about it at all. I am quite fond of your astronomy posts and that is quite clearly your specialty, but I think that if you come back and read these posts on climate change in a decade’s time, you’ll find them highly embarrassing, and that will be true even if most of what Michael Mann advocates is true.

haversham, models that predict the observed results would be nice. Oops, don’t have those. The original data would also be nice too. Whoops! all missing, conveniently, nobody knows where Mann’s original data is.

Phil said:

We are long past the time when this was simple skepticism — the open and honest questioning of evidence — and are now well into full-blown denial. This second release of emails is more evidence for that, especially given the timing.

The “hardest” of the hard sciences is Physics. They’re still trying to poke holes in Einstein, looking for frame dragging. Not one but two experiments have shown superluminal neutrinos. The science is by no means “settled” in Physics, and yet those who don’t toe the line and question whether the results are replicable (where’s the raw data?) or the models even valid have for decades been equated with Holocaust deniers. The phrase “the science is settled” should peg your BS meter.

Has the mainstream media learned their lesson? Absolutely not, they’ll continue to pander to the moron brigade until NYC is under water, then claim that the ground sunk or that NYC *ALWAYS* was under water.

” like a bacterium festering away someplace dank and fetid, Climategate is poised to infect reality once again”

The dark and fetid thing being infected is the warmists with the political backing. The warmists will make their data fit what will be funded. The funding will continue to come from politicians who want to remain in power.

The “hardest” of the hard sciences is Physics. They’re still trying to poke holes in Einstein, looking for frame dragging. Not one but two experiments have shown superluminal neutrinos. The science is by no means “settled” in Physics

uh, you realise that physics is a pretty big topic, right? there’s even more than you can learn in a whole afternoon! so you can have quite reasonably have uncertainty and debate about whether or not neutrinos can exceed the speed of light, while still being really quite confident that the biro you knocked off your desk will accelerate towards the floor.

The original data would also be nice too. Whoops! all missing, conveniently, nobody knows where Mann’s original data is.

exactly what data’s supposed to be missing? as far as i know, not one of Mann’s temperature reconstructions have involved gathering original data-series. and the sources he used are all documented here, complete with references to the original papers: http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/Mann/research/research.html

you seem to have confused “i don’t like the conclusions of this research” with “the researchers are wrong and dishonest”.

Say they manage to prove that the CRU work is tainted beyond repair. I do have to wonder what they are going to do about those other temperature series’ that say pretty much the same thing.
Oh but Mann and Jones exert some svengali-esque power over the whole science (so much so that flawed papers get published that they don’t like and they have to complain impotently about them to each other in private. Ph3ar their terrifying power!)

Say they manage to prove that the CRU work is tainted beyond repair. I do have to wonder what they are going to do about those other temperature series’ that say pretty much the same thing.

This is basically what many were saying way back when the deniers were clamouring for the CRU’s data and code in the first place. Any half-way competent coder with a basic knowledge of maths could have knocked out an approximate reproduction of the CRU’s work in a few hours. A sufficiently smart high school student could probably manage it. Their failure to actually do the necessary work pretty clearly shows that the deniers were never really interested in the scientific validity of HadCRUT. They were just generating a smoke screen.

I do have to wonder what they are going to do about those other temperature series that say pretty much the same thing.

…the other temperature series that show even faster warming.

yes, there is in fact a reason other than sheer stupidity why blogs such as WUWT interleave posts about how all CRU research is tainted because of those emails, and using HADCRUT to argue that the planet has been cooling since 1998.

What? Guilt by association? I was just pointing out that Penn State has a sterling record when it comes to investigating crime. Surely you don’t doubt this. I’m sure nothing will come of this latest batch of emails and none of it will tarnish The Cause one bit.

No. What I’d call “guilt by association” is the suggestion that the failure of some individuals at Penn State to even investigate one matter calls into question an investigation conducted by other individuals, and reviewed by the Inspector-General of the NSF, because…well, just because, apparently.

rms (#3): “If the emails are authentic, they show that they key actors knew the so-called “hockey-stick” they created was wrong; but kept silent (except in these emails).”

Two years ago, the first batch of stolen e-mails released was used selectively. They (whoever they were) focused on the ones they thought would be most damaging. Some unprofessional practices were revealed, but very little in the way of actions affecting any results.

The things to remember are: 1) no data was fabricated; 2) no “contrarian” papers were suppressed; 3) the CRU team is not the whole of climatology.

Also remember that, contrary to what the “contrarians” claim, if someone had real evidence that AGW was overstated, they’d gain great fame and wealth by publishing it.

Regarding this new release, I have to wonder how much of it is authentic. Why would the people who released it stop short of doctoring quotes?

but since these are the emails so staggeringly dull they didn’t make the cut first time (2000 of which were required to produce, what, 3 quote-mines? not exactly a fantastic yield…), what do you expect?

I used to wonder about Plait. Now I have no doubt he is a paid shill for the globalists.

No matter how the emails got out, the truth is that they completely indict the warmists as being political shills first, and then twisting the data, throwing away other contradictory data, and even making up data to make the conclusion fit the politics. Their own emails say as much. In other words, they are the precise opposite of scientists.

But this is all OK for Plait, whom I began to doubt when he began to attack all the quite real anomalies on Mars and the Moon.

No, none of these actual problems matter, because taxing everyone’s exhalations (gee, something that plants take in like we take in more oxygen) is a much more effective psyops campaign to get people to accept massive global genocide in the name of the planet’s future.

Good riddance to propagandistic trash. All of it. Maybe logic and real science can win the day, despite clowns like Mann and water boy Plait.

To all the climatologists (or do you prefer the term “climate scientists” now?) working on understanding the Human Induced Rapid Global Overheating (HIRGO as I prefer to call “global Warming”) that may, hopefully, be reading this :

I just want to let you all know that you have my respect and my admiration and my thanks.

I know you face death threats from the gibbering idiots out there just for doing your jobs and doing them well. I know you have had your patience tested and your words and integrity rudely, unjustly and tediously questioned by ignorami driven by ideology who wouldn’t know good science and reality if it kicked them in the groin.

I think the way you’ve been treated in the (non-scientific) socio-political “debate” over the reality of HIRGO has been an inexcusable disgrace.

It is long since time that people gave as much respect to NASA’s (& other institutions) top climatologists they do to NASA’s top rocket scientists and flight surgeons. Plus, naturally this applies to the non-NASA climatologists from other research instititions, universities and miscellaneous other bodies around the world.

If any climate scientists are reading this comment – please pass on my thanks and appreciation to your colleagues and reassure them all that there’s a truckload of people out there willing to listen and cheering you on. I’m just one of them.

The NSF? What about the Dept of Energy? I’ll bet their inspector general is pretty awesome. Phil Jones knows that the Dept of Energy wouldn’t hurt The Cause as he said in this email.

Here are a few other thoughts. From looking at Climate Audit every few days,
these people are not doing what I would call academic research. Also from
looking they will not stop with the data, but will continue to ask for the original
unadjusted data (which we don’t have) and then move onto the software used
to produce the gridded datasets (the ones we do release).

CRU is considered by the climate community as a data centre, but we don’t
have any resources to undertake this work. Any work we have done in the past
is done on the back of the research grants we get – and has to be well hidden. I’ve
discussed this with the main funder (US Dept of Energy) in the past and they are
happy about not releasing the original station data.
[…]
Some of you may not know, but the dataset has been sent by someone at the Met Office
to McIntyre. The Met Office are trying to find out who did this. I’ve ascertained it most
likely came from there, as I’m the only one who knows where the files are here.

which starts with a nice clip from the original (?) ‘V’ & is the last in a sub-series of three on this “Climategate” non-issue via Peter Sinclair’s ‘Climate Crock’ series linked above.

PS. Parts I & II are linked to my name in my earlier comment #59 posted November 22nd, 2011 at 5:56 pm and this comment here respectively.

Really after so many official investigations clearing the climatologists involved and so many excellent online debunkings* do we really still have to drive yet another stake through this zombie Climate Contrarian myth?

* Including some excellent debunkings in previous arguments on this very blog. If you go back & read the past comments threads on this you’ll find some pretty effective arguments against the “climategate” canard there alone.

WLR Paul (#54): You have no doubt I’m a paid shill, eh? So then you have some solid evidence of this, like a check stub from Big Global Warming, say? Or are you just making that accusation up out of — haha – hot air?

Who stole the emails? Hmmm, which billionaires have names ending in -och, at least ones with penchants for stealing emails (not with their own fingers, My God, what are you thinking-they have people for that….)?

I have always thought that “Climategate” was appropriately named — as there are very real parallels to be drawn in terms of *the theft of material intended for use in an extensive smear campaign…*

But there are also some essential differences. One of the biggest is that in the case of Watergate the material that was being stolen was meant to be used against political opponents in a smear campaign. In Climategate the opponents weren’t political opponents but scientists engaged in science and the smear campaign wasn’t simply aimed at them but an entire branch of physics.

And in Watergate those who broke in were caught and tried as criminals. In Climategate those who broke in weren’t caught, the press had little or no interest in them or their motives, and the press instead largely became deeply involved in the smear campaign, often going to great lengths to paint the victims as the criminals.

Amazing stuff (euphemism for stronger less socially acceptable terms) in some of the 63 replies posted so far! I was tempted to write a parody attacking the BA’s credentials to comment on any subject outside of his particular academic discipline, but that would involve attacking the scientific method itself (something Dr. Plait has written about many times as of fundamental importance in any scientific query) and my satirical skills aren’t nearly good enough to make any such parody remotely believable or entertaining. Besides, writing a parody may give some people a fleeting laugh, but has the awful potential to turn into an urban legend and be taken seriously, which scares the hell out of me.

Even though some reputable scientists have made discreditable statements outside of their own discipline (a Nobel Prize winner recommending mega-doses of vitamin C to stave off the common cold, for example), one of Dr. Plait’s avowed purposes behind this blog and the original Bad Astronomy site was to combat pseudo-science, which is definitely not limited to astronomy and astrophysics. For some reason, I seem to find many links that he and like-minded posters on this blog have provided that can lead a layman like me to articles and research written by scientists in the particular discipline the particular blog item is concerned with. Aside from a passion for astronomy that led me to this blog, I like to know what is going on in other areas of science, and have learned far more about science and contemporary research from this site and the places it has led me than from forty years of reading the newspaper. If I find Dr. Plait ever asking his readers to put credence in anything at all because of “I said so,” I will be regretful and hope that Neil deGrasse Tyson and his other friends put him back on track with copious amounts of “tough love.”

To Phil: Until you have an epiphany and start a cult around yourself as the true reincarnation of John Carter, Warlord of Mars, I will keep reading. Keep up the good work.

By the way, how did you attack the anomalies of the Moon and Mars? Do you have a weapon that DARPA hasn’t told the rest of the government about yet?

To Messier Tidy Upper: “ignorami,” what a beautiful word. I have added it to my vocabulary.
I have an early season’s quote for you:

“This boy is ignorance. This girl is want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy.” from “A Christmas Carol,” by Charles Dickens

My understanding is that the new emails aren’t new at all, but come from the same batch stolen 2 years ago. If so, it means the “new” emails weren’t deemed impressive enough to be part of the initial “Climategate” effort, so they will be even less impressive now.

That said, clearly whoever released them is at least a little media-savvy. The files (I’ve taken a look) contain a readme.txt that has cherry-picked quotes ready-to-go for the right-wing media to pick up on and repeat, just like they did with “Mike’s Nature trick” and “hide the decline” last time.

In fact, “hide the decline” – which was touted as proof of scientific fraud but which actually referred to nothing of the sort – is quoted again in the readme.txt file, which proves that the authors of the recent stuff care little for the accuracy of the information they’re promoting.

I heartily recommend the following sources to brush up on the initial 2009 “Climategate” affair:

The discussion on Skeptical Science: What do the ‘Climategate’ hacked CRU emails tell us? (http://goo.gl/GJcd6)

The discussion on RealClimate: Climategate One Year Later (http://goo.gl/FI5cc, and references therein)

There are a number of excellent resources online dealing with the climate denial industry, and a number of books and lectures too. I’m (slowly) compiling them on a single page, the ‘alpha version’ of which is here:http://www.lukesci.com/resources/climate-change/

Phil, I love how you declare results before the evidence is analyzed. I guess Muller’s statement about how “you can’t do this in science” fell on your deaf ears? And how Muller has never denied climate change, yet he’s called a ‘denier’ when all he’s done is point out bad science (the hockey stick, and the climategate “hide the decline”).

Can you consider the possibility that Mann, et. al. are right about warming, but have been proven unethical?

By the way , Plait, I have yet to see any ironclad, undisputable evidence of anything related to global warming happening and it being caused by humans, from you or anyone. Yet, you believe in and tout these fairy tales. You have faith in imaginary things. You are a puffed up clown.

Sheesh, and the science-ignorant clowns crawl out of the woodwork again to post the same stupid nonsense that has been thoroughly answered and debunked long ago, sometimes decades ago. They are incapable of even cracking a basic climate science textbook yet they run around claiming they have yet to see evidence for global warming. Hint: Try reading a textbook or a climate primer.

It’s like a never-ending game of Whack-a-Mole (or Troll). Any time one of them says they’ve yet to see evidence of X, it reminds me of Bill O’Reilly who says no-one can explain why tides go in and out. Just because you are completely in the dark does not mean everyone else is.

I thought this summed it up (from Climate Progress). Really, how many independent investigations do you need before you have to accept the results?

These are the “second string” emails. The Varsity team couldn’t derail the science so it’s really hard to see how the Junior Varsity team could. In other words, if multiple independent investigations [9 of them!] showed that climate science was unscathed by the original batch of emails — which must have been the ones the deniers thought were the best they had — then what precisely are the chances these even weaker second-stringers are going to beat the climate science team? After all, the climate science team has gotten considerably stronger in recent years.

@ Ed Minchau (#35): For science’s sake please note that two experiments done by the same group claim to have shown superluminal neutrinos. Those experiments have not been repeated elsewhere in the world, and certainly no consensus has been formed on their results or what they mean.

On the other hand, there appears to be a consensus on AGW, and there’s yet to be a different explanation or theory to counter AGW that has stood up to scientific scrutiny or provided significant challenge to the current AGW model.

Sure the current AGW model isn’t perfect and doesn’t explain everything, but what science is complete and explains everything? The AGW model is improving and with refinement is becoming more complete.

As others have mentioned, the raw data is out there for everyone to use in modeling and fleshing out competing theories. Have at it. After all, that’s what science is all about: observing, hypothesizing, testing, re-evaluating, rinsing, and repeating as necessary.

I’m really disappointed. You are calling those who don’t believe you heretics. Isn’t science based on the idea of skepticism and not ad hominem?

I think the underlying issue is that there is no uniform group of “climate change denialists”. There are many degrees of disagreement with the accepted scientific theory that range from the extreme (“the climate isn’t changing you are all lyers”) to the moderate (“we can agree that the planet is heating up, and that CO2 plays a role in it, but I still think there are more significant non-human-made causes”). Phil’s post seems to be mainly targeted at the more extreme end of the scale, because the moderate ones are (usually) open to evidence and reason and don’t outright refute all scientific work done on the subject.

But I wouldn’t even call the latter crowd “denialists”, because they don’t deny that it is happening, they are only convinced that there are causes we cannot influence; hence some of them even propose to focus our effort on dealing with the eventual outcome instead of trying to prevent it from happening.

The biggest problem of the scientific community is it’s inability to accept criticism. I guess it kind of comes with the territory. If you spend your whole life to learn about the way the world works you get a soft spot for people calling your work wrong. History is rife with examples of scientists holding on to “settled” science, sometimes aggressively defending it until the very last.

Now in this case, I highly doubt the science is wrong. The fact that we are in a period of rapid warming is undeniable and a human contribution is pretty much inevitable. There might be some questions to how big a part the human contribution actually plays and predictive models still have a little more wiggle room than I would like, but we can say with certainty that we really don’t want to live on world with rampant global warming. So if Michael Mann and his colleagues were right about the science (as clearly shown in many of Phil’s links), what is the problem?

The problem is not one of science itself but how some scientists work, in this case Michael Mann and his colleagues. While the emails don’t expose the science behind global warming, they sure expose the scientists. Every executive or politicians caught with his pants down like that would have to step down. It would not mean his policies were necessarily wrong but the way he worked did not live up to the standard set for such a position. That’s exactly the problem with “climategate”. It’s not the science that’s wrong it’s that some of the people involved were not living up to the standard we set for scientists. And instead of doing the prudent thing and stepping down, apologizing for the personal shortcomings and pointing out that the actual results of the research are holding up to scrutiny the scientists involved showed that they are not able to accept criticism.

It doesn’t matter whether the emails in the end interfered with the actual science or if they were taken out of context. They clearly and unmistakably showed frivolous activities. A politician that has an affair doesn’t instantly become worse at governing but he becomes unbearable for his public position. At the same time these emails simply expose the scientists involved and clearly show that they did not live up to the expectations their position holds. The fact that the involved people did not accept responsibility damaged not not only the integrity of themselves and their work but the scientific community in general. This only fuels the deniers claims and hurts the global awareness and much needed political support to combat global warming.

All because some scientists egos are to big to accept that they were caught with their pants down and admit their mistakes and step out of the way so that science can take center stage. The science will hold up to scrutiny, the people involved will not.

Oh nooooooo. The sky is falling. The seas are rising we are all going to drooooowwwwn. The droughts are so bad we are all going to burn alive or starve to death if the tornadoes and hurricanes don’t get us first and if we make it to winter we will be buried alive. It’s the apocalypse!

Robin, if they are still testing the Theory of Relativity more than 100 years after Einstein proposed it, then how come AGW gets a pass that not even Einstein gets?

again, there’s a huge difference between testing the more subtle predictions of a theory, and refusing to accept even the most basic and well-tested effects, regardless of the evidence (cf. Conservapedia).

so while climatologists are trying to pin down the details and and answer the open questions, there are still cretins out there screaming the planet has been cooling since 1998/2005/2010, or even that there is no such thing as the greenhouse effect.

Oh what utter rot Andreas. Most politicians step down over perceived controversy not actual wrong doing and this isn’t a good thing. A world ruled by media PR has turned British politics into a joke the last ten years or so. Your answer is to extend this to science as well? Complete madness.

No, what it is time for is a public that will not accept publicity games over facts, perception over reality, stupid image meta games that condemn people for appearing human in candid situations.
I mean, think about what you are saying: Mann and Jones didn’t do anything wrong, the science is intact, but it looks bad (which ought to be impossible given the preceding). And mostly it looks bad because of a quote mining smear campaign. But that’s reason enough for them to step down?

Most people on this planet have neither the knowledge nor the ability to actually test scientific claims. They have to TRUST that the scientific community and its control mechanisms work. A lot of science is public funded and scientific findings have profound implications on politic policies and our daily lives.

So scientists have to hold themselves to the highest standard of integrity and work ethic. This is not what Michael Mann and his colleagues did. The TRUST into the integrity of science, especially climate science is shaken and the inability and unwillingness of the people responsible to stand up to their faults is only making matters worse.

We can always take the easy way and blame the media. But they media print what the people want to read and they neither wrote or stole those emails. Integrity and trust are absolutely paramount for the acceptance and support of science and these researchers betrayed both and need to accept the consequences.

Are people listening to this? http://www.viddler.com/explore/heartland/videos/369/
If they’re not, ask them to reserve 15 minutes of their time for it. (Edit: I found this from opening this blog entry, but with the amount of links provided I missed who first presented it. So my apologies for missing attribution for the first person who posted it.)

WLRPaul, does the WLR stand for Where Lies Reality? Because you are far from it. Do you have any “ironclad undisputable” evidence for any of your ad hominems? I doubt it. Climategate 2 shows how desperate your sort are since BEST came out on the side of reality.

I agree. If only those deniers would accept that they are deniers, and realise that BEST was the death knell for their delusions.

Sadly, although BEST proves that GW is genuine (no surprise there, in fact), it leaves room for the deniers to say “it wasn’t people what done it!”.

Obviously, if the deniers thought about it for more than a microsecond, the cause of GW really doesn’t matter*. What matters is the most probable impact of GW, and what can be done to mitigate that impact.

* i.e. even if GW were due to some natural source of atmospheric CO2, reducing human CO2 emissions would still mitigate the effects.

Geez, Andreas is actually arguing character assassination is legitimate because it works, currently. And it works currently because of rank media pandering and cowardice, but apparently that’s ok too, because, y’know, it is (“it’s what the public wants, because it’s what it gets” has got to be the laziest piece of thinking on this subject. Yet surprisingly common) .

I must say I hope he hasn’t thought through what a thoroughly vile and insidious point of view that is. One that no one in science and skepticism should ever kowtow to. If they haven’t done anything wrong, they haven’t done anything wrong! Media stupidity (and their assumption of public stupidity) cannot be allowed to rule the day.

Most people on this planet have neither the knowledge nor the ability to actually test scientific claims. They have to TRUST that the scientific community and its control mechanisms work. A lot of science is public funded and scientific findings have profound implications on politic policies and our daily lives.

Agreed, for the most part.

So scientists have to hold themselves to the highest standard of integrity and work ethic.

Not necessarily. There are probably a dozen cases of scientific fraud that have been found out and publicised in the last decade or so. I recall one occasion that was uncovered by the magazine New Scientist, where an author had used the same protein gel image to support to separate papers (he had flipped the image for the second paper so it was not instantly recogniseable).

Scientists are people. Ergo, some of them will succumb to the pressure and the temptation to just make stuff up.

However, what the public must trust is that other scientists will uncover attempts at scientific fraud. If Scientist A’s competitors are convinced that Scientist A’s results withstand scrutiny, that should be good enough for anyone. After all, Scientists B, C and D wanted to make that discovery themselves, so if Scientist A’s data or methodology are flawed, B, C and D will jump on the chance to reduce A’s scientific standing.

This is not what Michael Mann and his colleagues did.

You are simply wrong. Multiple independent inquiries have exonerated Mann et al. of any wrongdoing.

The TRUST into the integrity of science, especially climate science is shaken and the inability and unwillingness of the people responsible to stand up to their faults is only making matters worse.

I agree with this. The authors of the lies about the solidity of climate science should own up and admit that they are wrong. After all, the evidence is overwhelming that AGW is a real phenomenon.

Think about it for a moment. By undermining public trust in climate science in general, who benefits? A. People who do not wish to recognise that they need to reduce their impact on the environment. B. Companies whose profits depend on continued damage to the environment. C. Politicians who are supported by funds from those companies.

Category A includes probably about 90% of us. Category B includes the entire oil and coal industries, whose aggregated profits are legendary. Category C includes up to perhaps a third of politicians in the US, with varying proportions elsewhere in the world.

We can always take the easy way and blame the media. But they media print what the people want to read and they neither wrote or stole those emails.

Nonsense! The media print what they think will generate sales. And the integrity of the media is also a factor. Journalism used to have a certain integrity to it, but the last 20 years or so has seen a downturn in such concepts. There was once a time when one could expect a newspaper to check at least the basic facts of a story before they run it. Now, reporting – especially of science stories – is presented so much in a “he said” / “she said” format that the reader is left to guess at the validity of the differing opinions. And in science, all opinions are not equally valid. Obviously, the uninformed reader chooses to believe the opinion that more closely matches his or her preferences.

Integrity and trust are absolutely paramount for the acceptance and support of science and these researchers betrayed both and need to accept the consequences.

Do you have any evidence at all that the scientists in question have betrayed any trust?

Does it not occur to you to wonder if the emails are being quoted out of context, or if the meaning of the words is being twisted to serve the agenda of the denialist lobby?

AFAICT, the climate scientists have behaved exactly as any scientist should be expected to.

The validity of climate science is as solid as that of current cancer research (for example). Do we see such objection to cancer-research science? No, we don’t. The biggest difference is that the conclusions arising from climate science have immense implications for the profits of some of the biggest companies on the planet.

The biggest problem of the scientific community is it’s inability to accept criticism.

This is so very wrong.

Science is the application of criticism.

To become a scientist, you must first learn to criticise your own work objectively. As a PhD student and post-doc, your work will be regularly criticised by your supervisor. Those aspects of it that you choose to share with the wider scientific community through presentations and papers will be criticised through peer review (where applicable) and potentially by the whole of the community of scientists working in your field.

No, scientists know how to accept criticism.

What they should not be expected to accept is invalid crtiticism.

And all of the so-called criticisms levelled at climate scientists by the denialists are either invalid or irrelevant.

By the way , Plait, I have yet to see any ironclad, undisputable evidence of anything related to global warming happening

Geez, have you been living under a rock fro the last 20 years?

1. Global average atmospheric temps are increasing. This trend shows a significant upward swing in the last 30 – 40 years.
2. Atmospheric concentrations of proven greenhouse gases have increased over the last 30 – 40 years. No mechanism that might prevent this from causing warming has even been proposed.
3. Polar sea ice volume has steadily decreased over the last 20 years.
4. Globally, all glaciers except one have shrunk over the last 30 – 40 years.
5. Glaciers throughout the world have been flowing faster in the last 20 years than previously recorded.
6. Global mean sea level has been rising for most of the last 30 years.
7. In the last 20 years, Arctic permafrosts that had been frozen since the last ice age have been melting seasonally.
8. Animal species whose ranges are limited by temperature have been migrating away from the equator.
9. The Earth’s infrared emissions at frequencies absorbed by CO2 have decreasesd since we started measuring them. This proves that the warming is linked to atmospheric CO2.

Global warming is real.

If you don’t consider this evidence to be “ironclad”, then maybe your standards are purposefully unreasonable.

and it being caused by humans,

1. No natural source that can account for the GHGs we observe at increasing concentrations in the atmosphere has been identified. Or even postulated.
2. Isotope ratios of the increased CO2 in the atmosphere indicate it derives mainly from fossil sources (oil, coal, natural gas).
3. Forest clearance reduces the cooling effect of tree transpiration.
4. Intensive farming has been shown to increase emissions of methane, one of the most potent GHGs. At the same time, atmospheric methane concentration has increased.
5. Burning of fossil fuels emits large quantities of CO2.
6. flooding caused by dam-building leads to increased emission of methane from vegetation that decomposes underwater.
7. Making cement emits large quantities of CO2.
8. Insolation during the last 30 years has, if anything, decreased slightly. If global temps are linked purely to solar output, we should have seen a decrease, not an increase.

The GW that we currently observe is almost certainly caused by human activities.

There is no credible debate over this point. What we should be debating is what to do about it.

from you or anyone. Yet, you believe in and tout these fairy tales. You have faith in imaginary things. You are a puffed up clown.

This is just so much contentless fluff. If you have a point to make, make it, and back it up with facts and reasoning.

Put it another way:
We dig up millions of tons of carbon, in the form of coal and oil and so on, and we burn it. What the hell do you expect to happen? And why?

But I think I indeed have clarify. Thanks to the scientific method, wrong conclusions will eventually overturned. That’s why science is such a beautiful and important part of our civilization. But I just wanted to start my post with a little wink that this not always comes easy and to often scientists defend so called “settled” science to the very last grasp. In my opinion this extends to non-scientific matters. Scientists don’t like to be criticized about their methods, how they handle public relations or most importantly how they are spending their funds. Usually scientists are the smartest people in the room, so accepting ideas from “lesser minds” isn’t always easy.

There are of course exceptions to the rule and the greatest science popularizes always found a respectful and insightful middle ground (ohh, where is our generations Carl Sagan…). But to many scientists come across as arrogant and distant and this increases the rift between science and the general public. Doing good research is simple not enough, you need to be able to find a way to get your finding across to the general population to generate progress in a democratic society!

@Andreas H #81
“The biggest problem of the scientific community is it’s inability to accept criticism. ”
O. M. G.
Science is built on criticism. Science requires putting things out there to be verified, criticized, and retested by a global community of peers. But the scientific community is getting a little annoyed at repeatedly being hit with ad-hominem attacks, already debunked factoids, political interference, rhetoric, and accusations of inability to accept criticism.
If you think the science is suspect, have the science redone.
Wait, Koch and Muller just did that…

And in Watergate those who broke in were caught and tried as criminals. In Climategate those who broke in weren’t caught, the press had little or no interest in them or their motives, and the press instead largely became deeply involved in the smear campaign, often going to great lengths to paint the victims as the criminals.

I just wanted to start my post with a little wink that this not always comes easy and to often scientists defend so called “settled” science to the very last grasp.

Perhaps so.

I guess Einstein is the easiest example here (he never really accepted quantum mechanics), but there is a key point that you disingenuously omit.

Where some scientists defend their cherished ideas to the “last gasp”, they are defending them against critical attacks by other scientists, who have a shared understanding of the fundamentals of the field in which they work. Scientists should not need to defend their work against people who have not taken the time or trouble to understand the basics of the field.

The climate is a complicated thing, and it makes noisy data. To extract real meaning from such noisy data takes some sophisticated tools, and for any criticism to be valid, it may only come from someone who understands these tools and their application and limitations.

In my opinion this extends to non-scientific matters. Scientists don’t like to be criticized about their methods, how they handle public relations or most importantly how they are spending their funds.

Well, I think I’d agree about the PR, but as for the rest, I think whether or not criticism is acceptable depends on whether or not the critic understands what the scientist is doing.

Usually scientists are the smartest people in the room, so accepting ideas from “lesser minds” isn’t always easy.

Well, I have certainly met scientists like this, but there are at least as many who are diligent and relatively humble, considering ideas purely on their merits.

I think the problem with climate science is not so much that the scientists can ‘t take the criticism but that the criticism was answered years (or even decades) ago. Back in – say – 1985, it was perfectly valid to speculate about whether human activity was really the cause of GW, and about whether or not the apparent warming trend was real and not merely a temporary anomaly, and so on. Since then, however, those criticisms (and others like them) have been answered by the acquisition of more and better data.

Objections that were valid then are not valid now. But they are repeatedly raised by the denialist lobby.

It seems to me that the authors of Climategate know perfectly well that they have no scientific grounds for objecting to the conclusions of climate science, and are doing everything they can to discredit some of the leading climatologists.

It’s not they they(denialists) are of limited intellectual ability(known in the old days as morons, idiots and imbeciles) (I can say that because I’m old,,,very old,,,and I don’t care who I irritate). It’s just that they want to be perceived as “warriors against the establishment”. They’re the same people who promote cold fusion(the latest version of which is the Rossi cold fusion device) because it would be so neat if it was true,,,and I WISH goat testicles could make me live 10,000 years,,,but I’ll probably be dead in a mere 25,,,bummer,,,

As my great – grand mother used to say,,,”If wishes were fishes, we’d all be kings,,,except for you Gary, because you’re a lousy fisherman,,,”

Gee, I wish CO2 wasn’t a green house gas,,,I wish I could live a lot longer than a mere 120 years,,,I wish COLD Fusion was real,,, I wish the denialists would just go away,,,Yeah, like THAT’s ever gonna happen.

God, I get so tired of pointing out to people that they’re naked,,,and wrong.

How do you know this? It has been pointed out that the their data has been available. Please clarify in light of this.

“The “hardest” of the hard sciences is Physics. They’re still trying to poke holes in Einstein, looking for frame dragging. Not one but two experiments have shown superluminal neutrinos.”

The existence of superluminal neutrinos has not been settled yet. It would be naive to accept this based just on 1 or 2 experiments where some factors in the experiment are tricky to get right. But if you can definitely show that neutrinos can travel faster than c, then you might be up for a Nobel prize for advancing our understanding of the universe.

“The science is by no means “settled” in Physics”

Speed of light in a vacuum is still at c, no matter what those rebellious neutrinos do. I think you’re confusing “settled” with “complete”. Physics and all others sciences do not completely describe the universe, but light does bend in a gravitational field and atom clocks can get out of sync depending how one of them moves. And yet Einsteins theories are know not to be complete and may yet be shown to be wrong like Newton. But you can’t ignore the evidence that has settled theories.

If you had not put in the disclaimer that you accept AGW, I would have said that you were trying to discredit climate science by poisoning the well and that you were trying to create doubt by character assassinating scientists as people who don’t like criticism and don’t want to consider the possibility of their ideas and conclusions as being wrong. And this is the sort of method that deniers use. Hence the reaction to your comments.

I think the issue here is that scientists with ego issues stick out and make a bigger impression than those that don’t. It’s like bad news getting more attention and good news on TV.

Honestly the only thing I truly wish is that more scientists would take the “Carl Sagan approach”. Whenever I listen to a talk-show or podium discussion with actual scientists present all you hear is “we are right, because we are right and you are wrong”. Now this is a perfectly valid argument, they are right, science proves it and deniers are wrong, simple as that. But it’s a stupid argument because it won’t do anything to gain acceptance in the general public or in politics. What made Carl Sagan so succesful in conveying scientific knowledge is that he always stated what we know, what we don’t know and why this is wondrous or important for everyone.

Right now climate scientists are afraid to mention what we don’t kow, because of a misguided belief that this would cause further doubt in the general public. But the opposite is correct, most people think something’s “fishy” if there is only one side to it.

The second part is even more important than the first one, they leave out the wonder that is our climate. They only draw horror-images and blame our lifestyle, while this might be true it directly blames people and puts them on the spot, something many don’t like. The much better approach would have been to explain what we learned about the climate and explain why we need to adjust our greenhous gas emissions. Educate people, explain the scenarios and then give them the option to choose.

Carl Sagan didn’t blame the people that a government they voted into office amassed a nuclear arsenal big enough to destroy the world as we know it and that they should immediatly stop all hostility towards communism or we might all die. He simply stated what he learned, was honest with the uncertainties and gave examples on what could happen. He didn’t lecture the people, he educated them and left them to make the only logical conclusion themselves without ever blaming them for the situation. And heck he even managed to bring some wonder to such a dark subject as the nuclear arms race. Like how it was even possible for us and some small atoms to generate such immense energies and how similar reactions fuel our own sun and the stars. Just youtube Carl Sagan/nuclear winter/arms race videos and see how he argued about the issue. That is rgw right way to bring a scientific message to the people.

As a denier, it is not my responsibility to prove any of this is happening or not. The IPCC report is filled with blatant errors. These should have been caught by the peer review process. Either this process was not done or it wasn’t done correctly. As far as I am concerned, if there is one misrepresented claim in the report the whole thing is trash. The opponents are not responsible for scrubbing the report.

Hey Phil, funny mention at the end of your article that made me remember this – I read a study last week that shows that people who watch Fox News know LESS than people who watch no news at all… and now we’re seeing that in action…

“Hey Phil, funny mention at the end of your article that made me remember this – I read a study last week that shows that people who watch Fox News know LESS than people who watch no news at all… and now we’re seeing that in action…”

IIRC, the corollary to that was that Fox watchers consider themselves to be among the better informed. Life is funny sometimes.

Did anyone reply to the person claiming that the Moon and Mars were warming? There are so many things wrong by claiming that, that it’s difficult to know where to start-:
– if you accept that we can measure temperatures on the Moon and Mars, then why don’t you accept that we can measure the Earth’s temperature?
– if it was the Sun what dun it, then why aren’t all the other bodies in the Solar System heating up?
– if it was a killer blow to AGW theory, how come no one else spotted it?
– do you really believe that no one has checked to see what the Sun is doing?

LR Paul wrote (#54): “But this is all OK for Plait, whom I began to doubt when he began to attack all the quite real anomalies on Mars and the Moon.”

Really? Wow! Was he using phasers, or photon torpedoes, in those attacks?

Wait until he gets to that bridge on Jupiter… It’s made of Ice9, you know. Once concentrated energy hits that, the balloon will really go up.

(I really thought your message might be a Poe. It’s sometimes hard to tell — which of course is what Poe’s Law is all about. But I see from the followups #71 and #72 that you’re in deadly earnest. More’s the pity.)

It’s odd; this second attempt is a double-edged sword. Obviously it worked so well to continue the denial – that is, to convince the denialists that they’re right – that they needed to do it again. And on the other hand, clearly it ‘backfired’ in that there’s nothing wrong with the science, so doing it again is necessary because they couldn’t change anything the first time around. Obviously this is all about continuing the distraction and denial rather than seeking truth. And it worked (to rally the troops, or as #75, Daniel puts it, to rally the team), as evidenced by the above comments, which are all punctuated by the same denialist arguments and the same – ignored – debunkings. Even when someone mentions that all the data has been released, not long after you have someone complain none of the data is available; there are many more examples of comments here that outright ignore or deny the obvious facts of many facets of this issue. This isn’t even whack-a-mole anymore, it’s more like a house of mirrors where the denialist still can’t see the image even though it’s shown to them like 50 times from different angles. And as usual, the denialists go on about everything *but* the actual science (except of course, to say it’s wrong), and they never actually produce evidence of any wrongdoing or wrong science. I’d stop calling them denialists if they’d even talk about the science for a minute, rather than the usual vague handwaves, conspiracies and ad hominems.

#54 WLR Paul broke my irony meter I think. Phil’s been attacking anomalies on Mars and the moon? And then goes on to say that pollution of air is a real problem, but it doesn’t affect the climate? WTF? You sir, have some weird ideas, but make for a perfect example of what I was saying above.

#67, LarryR, I agree wholeheartedly with your comment.

#82, Andreas H, if your argument was true, the leaks of government cables would have seen half the world’s politicians out on their asses. And yet, they aren’t. Plus, there’s a huge difference in taking professional criticism from your peers and being hounded by an organised effort to make your life hell due to a difference of opinion. And there’s a difference between a politician who can be voted out purely based on distaste for their actions, and an employee saying some things in a private email to a colleague for which you’d never get fired for. I’d say that being fired or resigning would also fuel the deniers, as it would seem to imply that the people involved actually did do something fraudulent and ‘unprofessionalism’ as a reason for leaving would be seen to be a cover story. … Then you go off the rails in #87, because as I’ve pointed out, pretty much the same thing happened with the cable leaks but no politician has gotten kicked off the island despite the fact that they betrayed trust *and* hold the world’s arsenals in their hands. Seriously, are you telling me you’ve never ever blown off steam about something to another person, privately? You’ve never bitched about a friend behind their back? You’ve never ever said anything that, out of context, sounds worse than it is? Please… The worst that you could say about any of these emails is exactly the above, and again, it’s nothing worth resigning over or getting fired for. Likewise, your implication in #101 that this resigning is somehow a necessary PR exercise for the whole of science is just a ludicrous expectation and not one I’m willing to bet that you’d apply to other fields. I agree communication is necessary, but seriously: these emails were *hacked*. No one ever expected them to see the light of day *except* to the people who they were actually addressed to. This is kind of like you writing a letter to your mother and complaining about something a sibling did, then someone finding it, reading it, making and posting copies all over the neighbourhood, then being kicked out of town because it was embarassing. How do you plan to PR your way out of something that wasn’t supposed to occur because you thought that your letters were private? If anything, it says more about the need for better hacking prevention, not about how much science needs better PR.

I’d also like to point out that your patience wears thin after repeated attacks and harassment; so you’ve got a bit of victim blaming in your argument too. Why is it up to the scientists to ‘do the right thing’ and fix the situation, when they’re not the ones at fault here? I’m sure they’ve got enough on their plate – such as dealing with numerous FOI enquiries, actually doing their day job, dealing with media enquiries and hate mail and police, etc etc – that I sincerely doubt they’d have the energy let alone the time to do PR on top of it. They’re probably already drowning in paperwork; not to mention some people don’t enjoy it and/or aren’t suited to it. This also applies to your point in #111; most scientists probably just want to get on with doing the actual science, and not have to worry about PR. Let’s face it, if it weren’t for this issue requiring a political input, nobody’d care about whether or not scientists need PR. They’d just accept it, like their iPhone. Nobody expects the inventors of the computer chip to be good at PR, so why is it necessary to expect it for climate change? (I’ve never heard any scientist simply say ‘we are right’ without following it up with ‘because X, Y, and Z’. And plenty of climate scientists say what we don’t know: we don’t know absolutely what the effects will be of climate change, or how bad it will be. The fact that you think scientists aren’t trying to educate them has to be the silliest point ever, since that’s exactly the point: scientists are holding out the data, saying this is what’s going on and how we figured it out, and the deniers and ‘sceptics’ out there are not listening to it. Meanwhile you’re expecting a bunch of scientists to step down for actually trying to provide information accurately to the public) The more I read of your comments the more I think you’re not actually agreeing with the science at all.

#96, Wow, the person/s who released the emails included a sort of readme file, in which cherry-picked quotes were added so you don’t have to bother reading the whole bunch of emails in context. It’s likely most people are too lazy to actually read the emails themselves and are instead quoting from the quotes.

I have always thought that “Climategate” was appropriately named — as there are very real parallels to be drawn in terms of *the theft of material intended for use in an extensive smear campaign…*
But there are also some essential differences. One of the biggest is that in the case of Watergate the material that was being stolen was meant to be used against political opponents in a smear campaign. In Climategate the opponents weren’t political opponents but scientists engaged in science and the smear campaign wasn’t simply aimed at them but an entire branch of physics.
And in Watergate those who broke in were caught and tried as criminals. In Climategate those who broke in weren’t caught, the press had little or no interest in them or their motives, and the press instead largely became deeply involved in the smear campaign, often going to great lengths to paint the victims as the criminals.

Heh, I’m surprised I never really thought about that before. I do wonder where the trail will lead if they ever catch the little buggers who stole those e-mails. I have a feeling the results would be quite interesting…

@111 Andreas: You have a point, but as I’m sure we can all agree, we can’t all be Carl Sagan. Most simply do not have the peculiar mix of charisma, poetic eloquence, passion and expertise that Sagan had. I’d also point out that, during the part of his career where he did a lot of science, he didn’t do a whole lot of science communication, and during the latter part of his career when he was a science popularizer, he did very little, if any, science. Both “scientist” and “beloved author and spokesperson” are full-time jobs!

The validity of climate science is as solid as that of current cancer research (for example). Do we see such objection to cancer-research science? No, we don’t. The biggest difference is that the conclusions arising from climate science have immense implications for the profits of some of the biggest companies on the planet.

I think you hit the nail on the head there, Nigel. Everyone should ask themselves why climate science is being singled out.
Specifically, I would ask that everyone asks themselves these questions:
• Why are we not being prompted to scrutinize the materials scientists, the particle physicists, the gene researchers??
• How likely is it that just one particular branch of the natural sciences is totally corrupt, while none of the others are?
• Why are groups which normally take no interest in academic processes suddenly so interested in a few specific people and agencies?
• And how likely is it that these groups (like Americans for Prosperity) are almost always funded by the oil industry?
•I would also ask yourself who you trust more: Scientists, who have staked their careers on and dedicated their lives to their research? Or industry-funded front groups, with such gems on their resumes as campaigns denying that tobacco smoke is harmful?
•And if you honestly think that the scientists are the less trustworthy group, ask yourself how you came to that conclusion?

I sincerely would like to hear some answers to these questions from the “AGW is all a big fat lying hoax!!!” crowd. Honestly.

Seems like there are enough leaders in the world that still don’t think there is real trouble

Indeed. That is the problem. The science has been settled a long time ago -the politicial “debate” stuff however keeps dragging on and preventing us from acting sufficently. Thermal inertia, the fact that there’s already so much carbon dioxide and warming committed “in the pipeline” means we’re in a lot worse trouble onthis than I think most folks really appreciate.

As the Skeptical Science article linked to my name explains the window for keeping temperature rises below the critical 2 degrees threshhold is closing very fast – and 2010 apparently saw record levels of C02 emissions. If James Hansen is right and we need to reduce to 350 ppm Co2 ASAP – with Co2 levels now around 390 and rising rapidly – then its looking pretty bleak for the future on the HIRGO front.

the only thing which stinks more is working with a gang of left liberal loons obsessed with global warming and homosexual lifestyle and hating every American who is not in complete agreement with them.

Congratulations. You finally cracked the code. We lefty liberals have been involved in a thirty-year climatosexual conspiracy to promote the gay agenda via the hoax of climate change. Converting the world to a sustainable, renewable-energy paradigm is but one of the points of the Gay Agenda. Controlling the weather is another. It’s no coincidence that the symbol for gay pride is a rainbow — a meteorological phenomenon. Frankly, I’m susprised you conserva-sleuths never picked up on that before.

Anyway, the truth is out now. I salute your formidable detectivism skills.

@67 LarryR Says:
“Even though some reputable scientists have made discreditable statements outside of their own discipline (a Nobel Prize winner recommending mega-doses of vitamin C to stave off the common cold, for example)”

Seriously?!
You naively defame one of the leading scientists of the 20th century, Linus Pauling, the only person to ever have won 2 unshared Nobel prizes in unrelated categories, by saying he made discreditable statements outside his discipline?!

Firstly, the greats of science would probably be described today as being “multidisciplinary”.
They didn’t feel constrained by some invisible boundary that prevented them from working in and contributing to other interesting fields of research. They were properly trained in the scientific method after all.

Secondly, Pauling didn’t just make statements about vitamin C, he was a real scientist, he actually published research on it. Like any scientist, he may have been right about his Vitamin C hypothesis or he may have been wrong but he was more than capable of defending his work in a scientific manner against the medical orthodoxy and continued to work on his Vitamin C research and many other disciplines until his death.

Thirdly, you think that one can do real Nobel prize work by following the “consensus”?
Where would we be today in treating most stomach ulcers if not for the persistence of Barry Marshall (and Robin Warren) against the medical orthodoxy and the vested interests of pharmaceutical companies? He was even accused of quackery! (the medical equivalent of denialism).http://www.vianet.net.au/~bjmrshll/features2.html

Coming back to vitamin C, certainly there have been cases of people who have had their lives saved by Vitamin C. I would urge anyone with an open mind to investigate what happened to Alan Smith from NZ who was on his deathbed from Swine Flu where the doctors wanted to turn off his life support except for his family fighting for the right to use intravenous Vitamin C treatment.
This knowledge could well save you or a loved ones life one day.http://www.laleva.org/eng/2010/10/vitamin_c_saves_man_dying_of_viral_pneumonia.html

@108. Nigel Depledge : Now, any chance you could mosey on back to this thread?

Didn’t realise that was still going .. if I’d have known earlier, I’d have rejoined the Great Planet Definition debate there sooner.

Okay. RL (work) committments will drag me away shortly, alas, but I’ve responded to some of your comments there already & will return and reply further when I can. Click on my name for link to my latest comment.

@95 Nigel Depledge:
“Do we see such objection to cancer-research science? No, we don’t.”

Yes we do. Go looking for it and you will find a growing number of people who object to the orthodox cancer industry which rejects any cures which do not profit big pharma/big medicine.

“The biggest difference is that the conclusions arising from climate science have immense implications for the profits of some of the biggest companies on the planet.”

Yes indeed that is so true. The bankers and big governments will not make obscene amounts of cash if its proven to be a hoax. Anyone who thinks that Carbon Trading in the hands of those who created the GFC is going to solve anything are highly deluded.
I’m a true environmentalist. This distraction over Carbon detracts from things that we really should be focussing on. Like education and poverty reduction which will reduce population growth. Then we have things like soil nutrient depletions, food biodiversity, energy independence, recycling, etc.
The climate has always changed and always will, just cope with it.

@ 123 Joseph G Says:
November 23rd, 2011 at 4:40 pm

“Specifically, I would ask that everyone asks themselves these questions:”
“• Why are we not being prompted to scrutinize the materials scientists, the particle physicists, the gene researchers??”

Huh? Those areas of science are not being used as the basis to ask the world to fundamentally change how it operates and to commit untold amounts of money to solve some alleged problem in the far off future when they can’t even predict the weather accurately?
Even if its all true, why is prevention better than an adaptation strategy?

“• How likely is it that just one particular branch of the natural sciences is totally corrupt, while none of the others are?”

Follow the money. Climate Science and anything related to it is a cash cow for researchers.
Money and power corrupts. Scientists are not the new noble savage of our times.

“• Why are groups which normally take no interest in academic processes suddenly so interested in a few specific people and agencies?”

Because those people and agencies are being used as justification as to why those groups should change their way of life and pay money.

“• And how likely is it that these groups (like Americans for Prosperity) are almost always funded by the oil industry?”

Most skeptics are individuals and not funded by anyone. They have real jobs and pay taxes. If someone lucked out and got some oil company to pay them then I say good luck to them but they would be in the minority.
The AGW groups have access to much more funding and resources from governments and NGOs than the skeptics would ever have. Besides you’d be naive if you think that the oil companies haven’t already positioned themselves to profit from Carbon Trading scams.

“•I would also ask yourself who you trust more: Scientists, who have staked their careers on and dedicated their lives to their research? Or industry-funded front groups, with such gems on their resumes as campaigns denying that tobacco smoke is harmful?”

Sorry thats a lame Strawman argument. Scientists are humans hence corruptible like anyone else. There are no noble savages.

“•And if you honestly think that the scientists are the less trustworthy group, ask yourself how you came to that conclusion?”

Not all scientists are less trustworthy just like not all scientists are in consensus with AGW.

Anyone who sees himself working to promote a “cause” is no longer a scientist, but a political activist.

Judith Curry is the Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who dissents from AGW orthodoxy and believes that the science is far from settled. Do you really think this blatant bias is “much ado about nothing”?

“// The Cause ///

Mann:

By the way, when is Tom C going to formally publish his roughly 1500 year
reconstruction??? It would help the cause to be able to refer to that
reconstruction as confirming Mann and Jones, etc.

Mann:

They will (see below) allow us to provide some discussion of the synthetic
example, referring to the J. Climate paper (which should be finally accepted
upon submission of the revised final draft), so that should help the cause a
bit.

Mann:

I gave up on Judith Curry a while ago. I don’t know what she think’s she’s
doing, but its not helping the cause.

An excellent post you provide there, with good questions as well.
Not surprising to see deniers provide excuses, of course.

I imagine that decades in the future, should the Artic ocean be ice-free, that deniers will still make the same claims they do today.

@128 Peter Pserp
“Even if its all true, why is prevention better than an adaptation strategy?”

Because it can prove just as costly, if not more so.

Are you not willing adapt to usage of new energy resources? New technologies that allow for us to reduce our impact on climate?

Or are you willing to make adaptations that let you keep the status quo?

Such preventative measures also are useful in the case of limited resources. Oil and coal aren’t limitless, you know. The time for action should be now. Not when it’s too late to do anything about it. And it can be a win-win situation.
Consider that.

Really? On what basis are you claiming that?
My view is that technology is going to be the driver for any required solution as it has been for thousands of years.
A truism of technology is do not buy today that which you can defer until the future as it will be cheaper and more capable at that time. We do not need to do anything right now in terms of adaptation or mitigation. And since we do not have any crystal balls, a much better approach will be to focus our funds and energies on specifics as and when required.

Meanwhile there are real environmental problems that need to be tackled immediately as I indicated. Take the time to learn about opportunity costs.

“Are you not willing adapt to usage of new energy resources? New technologies that allow for us to reduce our impact on climate?
Or are you willing to make adaptations that let you keep the status quo?
Such preventative measures also are useful in the case of limited resources. Oil and coal aren’t limitless, you know.”

Ummm did you even try to comprehend what I said?

Firstly, we will starve to death from over-population and food shortages before we will be impacted by any adverse climate change. So why would I prioritise climate over short term survivability?

Secondly, see where I said energy independence? That certainly isn’t going to come from fossil fuels.
It implicitly implies new energy sources and it is crucial but the driver for it has nothing to do with Carbon or climate change but sustaining our civilisation.

Thirdly, a carbon tax/carbon trading scheme is not going to achieve anything concrete. Its there to further enrich the 1% at the expense of the 99%. I mean we are supposed to be concerned about all this AGW for the benefit of the 99% right? Certainly not for that hypocrite Al Gore who probably is the 1% of the 1%!

“The time for action should be now. Not when it’s too late to do anything about it. And it can be a win-win situation.
Consider that.”

Yep considered it and my response is No.
Why do I say no? Purely because if you act now the only prudent response can be a scattergun approach which spreads your resources too thinly.
A targeted approach is like pre-picking lottery winners in which history shows we are very poor at doing so we could waste all our resources for nought only to be faced with a completely different set of problems to solve.

Phil, that picture is perfect. Exactly what you’re doing: covering your ears and pretending you can’t hear the evidence debunking the global warming scam. Go on, keep believing that myth. So much for being a skeptic…

there was that famous glacier one. and the Netherlands one, where their source (a NL government report) confused the proportion of the country below sea-level with the proportion of the country at direct risk of flooding.

as far as i’m aware that’s it, but i’d be interested in seeing any others. or are you just one of those “i don’t like the conclusions, so the report is necessarily wrong somewhere, even if i can’t find it”

“These should have been caught by the peer review process. Either this process was not done or it wasn’t done correctly.”

two mistakes in a highly technical 3 volume, 3000 page report that references thousands of papers? that sounds like a truly heroic feat of fact checking to me…

scientists are people, and people make mistakes. i don’t see how binning the entire report on the basis of a couple of mistakes is anything other than insane.

“The opponents are not responsible for scrubbing the report.”

…and yet, after the Himalayan glaciers thing, the denial blogs were all over the report looking for any more mistakes they could use to discredit it. considering their tendency to highlight every twatty little mistake, i think their failure to find anything else speaks volumes…

0999“My work is as Director of the national centre for climate change research, a job which requires me to translate my Christian belief about stewardship of God’s planet into research and action.”
[CAGW ‘scientist’ Mike Hulme, in response to an email by BBC’s Songs of Praise, who wanted to interview him about “Christians in Agriculture/the Environment etc….”]

Peter Pserp doesn’t want a scattergun approach for global warming but he does support one for cancer research. Apples and oranges perhaps, but it still strikes me as odd. The reason cancer research is so focused and slow (despite his alt-med conspiracy theory allusions) is they are intervening in a complex system and don’t want to get it wrong long term. I’d guess he’d recognise this from whatever alt-med boards he peruses: if medicine hasn’t got an answer or moving fast enough to try more approaches it’s because of corrupt ties to Big Pharma. If they do move quickly to a solution and it doesn’t work or causes unpleasant side effects “It’s Thalidomide all over again!” (and they were going too fast and without concern for human life because of Big Pharma corruption, of course).
This actually applies to climate interventions as well (the slow research part, that is) as figuring out if something will work and not make a terrible mess is going to take a terribly long time. There’s not going to be any point where we figure it out perfectly and laser focus some massive global solution in a short space of time. (and people call me an over optimistic pinko with too much faith in human nature. I’ve got nothing on this)
There is something we can start doing right now, however. Lots of things in fact. No shame in using a scatter gun when it’s all you’ve got.

Right now climate scientists are afraid to mention what we don’t kow, because of a misguided belief that this would cause further doubt in the general public. But the opposite is correct, most people think something’s “fishy” if there is only one side to it.

Well, I suppose this depends on where you get your science news from.

Only a few weeks ago, NewScientist magazine ran an “Instant Expert” on AGW, and its layout took each of the main points and dealt with them in two boxes – the boxes being titled “what we know” and “what we don’t” for each point. I don’t recall the author’s name, but this shows that there’s at least one leading climatologist who is doing exactly what you suggest should be done, in a public forum.

As a denier, it is not my responsibility to prove any of this is happening or not.

Yes, it bloody well is. If you want to criticise what almost all of the world’s climatologists are conccluding, then you must do so using evidence and reason, not empty rhetoric.

The IPCC report is filled with blatant errors.

Just one blatant one that I’m aware of. Do you have a list of the “blatant” errors in the IPCC report? References to the published IPCC report and to facts supporting your allegations are, of course, expected for any answer to be credible.

That’s fantastic, i need to get my hands on that magazine then. It’s obviously impossible to account for every publication on the matter, but I’m actually pretty hopeful that the tone of the dialogue will change.

Another angle that I would like to be worked more thoroughly by Scientists or maybe better environmental interest groups is that most proposed actions will have a lot of positive secondary effects beside the primary goal of reducing green house gas emissions. Whether it is just general air quality or economic innovation and leadership. I think there is a lot of potential to counter the big-industries “we can’t compete if we have to change our ways” argument.

But to come to a circle and return to the issue at hand. Who should be the “face of global warming”? Al Gore had a moment in the spotlight, but for various reasons has faded and lost some credibility and of course is no Scientist in the first place. Most environmental organizations like Greenpeace and others worked very aggressive on various battlefields and seem somewhat “used up” and have just as many enemies as they have supporters. And then of course the IPCC has this huge credibility problem that they still haven’t properly addressed.

I truly believe we need either a Person or an Organization with a clean slate and a fresh way to argue the global warming issues. Or maybe even better a political leader with the power and support to actually push solutions forward. But in the current economical “climate” (pun intended) this seems increasingly unlikely…

In the example I used of Dr. Pauling, I had no intention of defaming him. By the term “discreditable statement,” I was saying that it was a statement that was able to be discredited, not that the statement brings discredit on a scientist who is in the New Scientist magazine’s list of the 20 greatest scientists of all time.

Nor do I believe that Dr. Pauling did no research on Vitamin C. I know for a fact that he did.

I also do not believe that one can do real Nobel Prize work by following the “consensus.”

I am sorry that the way I worded my example was construed as an attack on a man who made original and invaluable contributions to science.

You naively defame one of the leading scientists of the 20th century, Linus Pauling, the only person to ever have won 2 unshared Nobel prizes in unrelated categories, by saying he made discreditable statements outside his discipline?!

Firstly, the greats of science would probably be described today as being “multidisciplinary”.
They didn’t feel constrained by some invisible boundary that prevented them from working in and contributing to other interesting fields of research. They were properly trained in the scientific method after all.

Secondly, Pauling didn’t just make statements about vitamin C, he was a real scientist, he actually published research on it. Like any scientist, he may have been right about his Vitamin C hypothesis or he may have been wrong but he was more than capable of defending his work in a scientific manner against the medical orthodoxy and continued to work on his Vitamin C research and many other disciplines until his death.

Actually, Pauling is a very good example of a great scientist latching onto a wrong conclusion and not following the data. Even while he was still working on and publishing his vitamin C work, evidence was accumulating that it was not, as he proposed, a cancer prophylactic. As I understand it, the consensus view now is that he was wrong, and that there was enough evidence available at the time to make this a sound conclusion.

@95 Nigel Depledge:
“Do we see such objection to cancer-research science? No, we don’t.”

Yes we do. Go looking for it and you will find a growing number of people who object to the orthodox cancer industry which rejects any cures which do not profit big pharma/big medicine.

You are moving the goalposts. I said nothing about the discovery of potential treatments. I was referring to the fundamental research that is improving our understanding of what cancer is and potential approaches that might be taken to combat it in the future. No avenue is being left uninvestigated.

Of course, because cancer is such a big issue, there are plenty of pharma and biotech companies looking into potential treatments, but to be frank I don’t believe the next “blockbuster” drug is going to be a cancer treatment.

“The biggest difference is that the conclusions arising from climate science have immense implications for the profits of some of the biggest companies on the planet.”

Yes indeed that is so true. The bankers and big governments will not make obscene amounts of cash if its proven to be a hoax. Anyone who thinks that Carbon Trading in the hands of those who created the GFC is going to solve anything are highly deluded.

You are ignoring the main point and setting up a strawman out of a side-issue.

Whether or not AGW is a real phenomenon has nothing to do with whether or not carbon trading is the best way to tackle it.

The fact remains that the oil industry is probably the most profitable on the planet after banking. And, if you face reality, you’ll see that the present economic systems we operate allow bankers to turn huge profits whether we have carbon trading or not.

Also, if you care to actually find out some of the facts of the matter, you will find that carbon trading schemes are often criticised by environmentalist organisations because if they are set up wrong they will lead to an increase in emissions instead of a decrease.

Oh, and most governments could not turn a profit if their lives depended on it. Perhaps you refer to corrupt politicians?

I’m a true environmentalist. This distraction over Carbon detracts from things that we really should be focussing on. Like education and poverty reduction which will reduce population growth.

What utter rubbish!

While it is true that the problems would be smaller if there were fewer people on the planet, the fundamental issue is not the number of people, but the way in which we people treat natural resources and what were previously regarded as natural “disposal systems” such as the atmosphere.

Education and poverty reduction are, of course, worthy goals, but they do not have the urgency of dealing with AGW.

Of which the latter two can contribute to reduced emissions of GHGs, but energy independence is a social and political issue mainly, not so much an environmental one, except insofar as if you use fossil carbon to become independent in energy production, you are becoming a bigger part of the problem.

The climate has always changed and always will, just cope with it.

The climate has never changed as fast as it is now.

Past climate change has never before been driven by the activities of a single species.

The climate has been unusually stable for the last 2000 years (-ish), which is what enabled our modern, sophisticated society to develop. Our modern, sophisticated society that relies on a stable climate to continue. Or do you have some cunning scheme to deal with the problems that are likely to arise when perhaps a third of the world’s arable land becomes unuseable due to shifting rainfall patterns and rising sea level? Or perhaps you’d like to suggest where we should relocate about half of the population of Bangladesh? Or London?

Excellent points, hitting home on the ideas that deniers don’t think about.

On energy independence, I suppose that where we to switch over to energy production that doesn’t rely on fossil carbon that this, in part, would be a solution?
For example, more usuage of solar energy (be it solar electric or solar thermal), nuclear power, ect?

But to come to a circle and return to the issue at hand. Who should be the “face of global warming”? Al Gore had a moment in the spotlight, but for various reasons has faded and lost some credibility and of course is no Scientist in the first place.

In fact, most sociologists could have told us that using Al Gore as a figurehead was a losing proposition from the start, because AGW deniers see him as partisan before he has even said anything. Thus, they will convince themselves that he is lying to suit his own agenda.

Most environmental organizations like Greenpeace and others worked very aggressive on various battlefields and seem somewhat “used up” and have just as many enemies as they have supporters. And then of course the IPCC has this huge credibility problem that they still haven’t properly addressed.

The IPCC’s “credibility problem” is the result of a smear campaign by the denialists, but that is not to say that it doesn’t exist. No, the IPCC is now also seen as partisan, so is not likely to convince deniers. Greenpeace and other extreme environmental groups are “obviously” serving some communist plot (no, I don’t believe it myself, but there you go).

I truly believe we need either a Person or an Organization with a clean slate and a fresh way to argue the global warming issues.

Insurance companies and financiers.

Thus far, most of these organisations have remained neutral. If science can prove that a link exists between extreme weather events and AGW, then insurers will be open to sue polluters. Then the game changes.

Or maybe even better a political leader with the power and support to actually push solutions forward. But in the current economical “climate” (pun intended) this seems increasingly unlikely…

Certainly the US political system seems contrived to prevent any adminstration from actually achieving anything. For the two houses to have so much influence over fine detail means that a party needs to have the presidency and a majority in both houses to get anything done. IMO, that’s too many boxes that need ticking.

European parliamentary governments tend to have an administration that has control over the day-to-day running of the nation, with parliamentary voting for enacting new laws.

And, hey, guess where the most progress has been made to date in reducing CO2 emissions? Europe. (Although, to be fair, Germany’s U-turn over the use of nuclear power as a bridging technology does mean that it is unlikely to meet its CO2 emission reduction targets).

On energy independence, I suppose that where we to switch over to energy production that doesn’t rely on fossil carbon that this, in part, would be a solution?
For example, more usuage of solar energy (be it solar electric or solar thermal), nuclear power, ect?

Essentially, yes.

Energy independence is not really the issue. IMO, it is a smokescreen.

It doesn’t really matter where one’s electricity is generated as long as it is generated using low-carbon or zero-carbon technology.

Thus, the plan for a pan-European “supergrid” would have the following elements:
Iceland exploiting geothermal power (which it does already)
Mountainous countries exploiting hydroelectric power
Windy countries exploiting wind energy
Coastal and island nations exploiting wave or tidal power
Spain, Greece and northern African nations exploiting solar power

All to be linked by an ultra-high-voltage supply grid (preferably using superconducting cables if that technology is available) that supplies power to all participants.

This plan is probably a pipe dream, but it illustrates the principles that might need to be involved. The best thing about the concept of energy independence is that it might spur nations that don’t have reserves of fossil carbon to develop low-carbon and zero-carbon technologies. But the attractiveness of “energy independence” comes with a risk that nations rich in fossil carbon may simply ignore the issue and conrinue to increase their CO2 emissions.

@138 Muzz Says:
November 24th, 2011 at 3:20 am
“Peter Pserp doesn’t want a scattergun approach for global warming but he does support one for cancer research. Apples and oranges perhaps, but it still strikes me as odd. The reason cancer research is so focused and slow (despite his alt-med conspiracy theory allusions) is they are intervening in a complex system and don’t want to get it wrong long term. I’d guess he’d recognise this from whatever alt-med boards he peruses: if medicine hasn’t got an answer or moving fast enough to try more approaches it’s because of corrupt ties to Big Pharma. If they do move quickly to a solution and it doesn’t work or causes unpleasant side effects “It’s Thalidomide all over again!” (and they were going too fast and without concern for human life because of Big Pharma corruption, of course).
This actually applies to climate interventions as well (the slow research part, that is) as figuring out if something will work and not make a terrible mess is going to take a terribly long time. There’s not going to be any point where we figure it out perfectly and laser focus some massive global solution in a short space of time. (and people call me an over optimistic pinko with too much faith in human nature. I’ve got nothing on this) There is something we can start doing right now, however. Lots of things in fact. No shame in using a scatter gun when it’s all you’ve got.”

Seriously dude what was all that about? alt-med? never heard of it?!

The claim was:
“The validity of climate science is as solid as that of current cancer research (for example). Do we see such objection to cancer-research science?

He was conflating climate research with some perceived holy grail in current cancer research that was never criticised.
I countered by reference to the fact that objections do indeed exist thus the claim is flawed. Thats how science works… just need only one example that counters a hypothesis and its back to square 1 to try another hypothesis. Sounds cruel I know but hey thats science!

Climate interventions?! hahahaha yes we really do need to sit down with Mother Nature and tell her she has a serious problem and we are here to help!

The hubris of those who suggest that we should get into geo-engineering without understanding its unintentional consequences is astounding. We don’t even understand fully how climate even works!
In any case the earth will continue on irrespective of us… we might all die out through our own meddling but it will be no different to the thousands of species that go extinct every day that we have no impact on whatsoever and don’t even realise they exist.

@144 Nigel Depledge Says:
November 24th, 2011 at 5:39 am
“Actually, Pauling is a very good example of a great scientist latching onto a wrong conclusion and not following the data. Even while he was still working on and publishing his vitamin C work, evidence was accumulating that it was not, as he proposed, a cancer prophylactic. As I understand it, the consensus view now is that he was wrong, and that there was enough evidence available at the time to make this a sound conclusion.”

Nigel your exact same claim could be attached to some high profile climate scientists who attack not with science but with ad hominem and often rely on claims to authority. There is no authority in science except evidence and we should all be suspicious of anyone who acts to hide anything. Sunshine is the best disinfectant.

Coming back to Pauling, I suggest you really do some research on how easy it is for allegedly independent testing to be manipulated by corrupting the samples or incorrectly dosing with the same substance and when it doesn’t work properly then it is demonised.

And please don’t say it doesn’t happen as there have been many cases now of supposedly robust testing for modern pharma drugs that have been flawed or even worse adverse results hidden to allow the drug on to the market only to be pulled later because it was killing people!

As I said, Pauling may have been right or wrong or maybe he was both. But I do have faith that he followed the scientific process and he properly disputed the findings of those who claimed to replicate his work when they (for whatever reason) did not actually fully replicate it.

Based on what happened in NZ, if I was ever suffering from an extreme viral pneumonia I would be demanding IV Vitamin C treatment… its not going to kill me, but it may well save my life.

No just refuting your conflation of Climate Science orthodoxy with the allegedly “noble” cause of cancer research.

“I said nothing about the discovery of potential treatments. I was referring to the fundamental research that is improving our understanding of what cancer is and potential approaches that might be taken to combat it in the future. No avenue is being left uninvestigated.”

Simply not true… please explain why the FDA is involved in the demonisation and harassment of Dr Burzynski who is not an alternative faith healer nor a quack but a modern medical scientist who’s research has been trying to work within the system as far as possible but has been impeded in so many ways its a joke.

Any field that refers to itself as being in a state of “A war on…” is highly susceptible to corruption.

The initial true believers corrupt themselves into thinking that the ends justify the means and then once institutional power has been obtained they quickly transform into “the process is more important than the outcome”.

Unfortunately such is the way of man.

“You are ignoring the main point and setting up a strawman out of a side-issue.
Whether or not AGW is a real phenomenon has nothing to do with whether or not carbon trading is the best way to tackle it.”

Incorrect. Cui bono.
It is exactly how it is to be tackled that has caused the natural antibodies of skepticism to rise up. Other scientific endeavours are mostly left alone because they are not attempting to change the world so profoundly so quickly for the benefit of the 1%.

“Also, if you care to actually find out some of the facts of the matter, you will find that carbon trading schemes are often criticised by environmentalist organisations because if they are set up wrong they will lead to an increase in emissions instead of a decrease.”

Environmentalist organisations are now big business and have long been co-opted by those who seek to play their power games not because they truly care.

So what about those Africans who have been evicted from their own lands (or murdered if they refuse to leave), all to make way for plantations of an invasive non-local species (tasmanian blue gums) which will totally screw their local soil environment all for the sake of some “carbon credits”? Go tell those Africans that those environmentalist organisations have their best interests at heart.
Genocide of humans seems to be ok with those of the Green religion but I suppose its just unfortunate collateral damage and unintended consequences right?

“Oh, and most governments could not turn a profit if their lives depended on it. Perhaps you refer to corrupt politicians?”

Yes agreed. But most of the elite climate scientists have long transformed into political operatives or at the very least their sycophants.

“Education and poverty reduction are, of course, worthy goals, but they do not have the urgency of dealing with AGW”

There is no urgency on AGW. The world is not going to end any time soon.
Lack of education and poverty are affecting people right now!

“The climate has never changed as fast as it is now.
Past climate change has never before been driven by the activities of a single species.”

Its not changing so fast that we humans can’t deal with it.
Besides which within my own middle aged lifetime the fear mongers can’t even definitively decide whether we were to be afraid of cooling or heating!
What will the new fear be next year?

And who cares if it was changed by one species or not. If we are so great as to impact the climate, then we live with the consequences. Besides which the recent IPCC leak has already said that the alleged human impact on warming over the next 30 years is going to be swamped by natural factors.http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15698183
WTF?!

“The climate has been unusually stable for the last 2000 years (-ish), which is what enabled our modern, sophisticated society to develop. Our modern, sophisticated society that relies on a stable climate to continue. Or do you have some cunning scheme to deal with the problems that are likely to arise when perhaps a third of the world’s arable land becomes unuseable due to shifting rainfall patterns and rising sea level? Or perhaps you’d like to suggest where we should relocate about half of the population of Bangladesh? Or London?”

Everything else is a fear based strawman…. and please don’t pretend to care for the third world because they are already being screwed over to pay for your western guilt about some invisible gas that is the basis for life.

“Energy independence is not really the issue. IMO, it is a smokescreen.
It doesn’t really matter where one’s electricity is generated as long as it is generated using low-carbon or zero-carbon technology.”

You clearly have no idea about power engineering do you.

“Thus, the plan for a pan-European “supergrid” would have the following elements: Iceland exploiting geothermal power (which it does already) Mountainous countries exploiting hydroelectric power Windy countries exploiting wind energy Coastal and island nations exploiting wave or tidal power Spain, Greece and northern African nations exploiting solar power
All to be linked by an ultra-high-voltage supply grid (preferably using superconducting cables if that technology is available) that supplies power to all participants.”

Good luck with that… everything is just happening by scattergun and its a waste of resources of monumental proportions.

Those areas of science are not being used as the basis to ask the world to fundamentally change how it operates and to commit untold amounts of money to solve some alleged problem in the far off future when they can’t even predict the weather accurately?
Even if its all true, why is prevention better than an adaptation strategy?

First, who says scientists can’t predict the weather properly? Relatively recently, weather forecasts were often useless more then 48 hours out, and now meteorologists are making reliable 10-day forecasts. The science has improved dramatically, and continues to improve. Besides, weather and climate are two different things as far as forecasting goes. Counter-intuitively, climate is easier to predict then weather, because it’s the sum of a lot of chaotic weather events that are averaged together. You could compare it to predicting a coin flip. Your odds of choosing a single flip correctly are only 50%, however, if you flip a coin 100 times, and you predict that heads will come up 40-60 times, you’ll almost certainly be right.

In any case, the validity of the science is unrelated to the question of whether prevention or adaptation is a better strategy. Climate science tells us what is happening, not the best course of action to take. Of course, certain folks simply don’t want to admit that we’ll need to take any action at all, ever. If you want to argue for adaptation, that’s fine, but that’s not really what this discussion is about.

Follow the money. Climate Science and anything related to it is a cash cow for researchers.
Money and power corrupts. Scientists are not the new noble savage of our times.

Seriously? This is possibly the least supportable thing I’ve read today. What’s your evidence that there’s significantly more money to be had for climate science then for any other discipline? And what’s your evidence that industry-funded think tanks that publish contrarian opinion are going to reward scientists less then the typical grant sources? Truth be told, the fact that relatively few scientists are shilling for monied industry on this issue proves to me that, yes, broadly speaking, scientists do tend to have integrity.

Because those people and agencies are being used as justification as to why those groups should change their way of life and pay money.

Again, these are distinct issues. Why attack the science (when, for all the scrutiny, it keeps being vindicated) and not specifically the groups that are advocating these changes that you believe are detrimental?

Most skeptics are individuals and not funded by anyone. They have real jobs and pay taxes. If someone lucked out and got some oil company to pay them then I say good luck to them but they would be in the minority.

The same could be said for anyone. Most people who believe in homeopathy aren’t being paid for it. But specifically, the groups (funded groups) that are trying to stir up doubt are being well funded by industry. If other people are convinced by their efforts, of course they’ll carry the torch without being paid.

The AGW groups have access to much more funding and resources from governments and NGOs than the skeptics would ever have. Besides you’d be naive if you think that the oil companies haven’t already positioned themselves to profit from Carbon Trading scams.

I’m curious, where do you get the idea that climate change research is just swimming in moolah? Perhaps it is, but I haven’t seen any evidence.
And of course oil companies are positioning themselves to profit from carbon trading schemes. Truth be told, I’m not a big fan of carbon credit trading for that very reason. Oil companies are also positioning themselves to monopolize renewable energy, if they can. But in the meantime, they’re going to continue to do what’s most profitable, which for now is pumping oil. And they’re going to continue doing whatever they can to keep drilling unimpeded (which means spreading FUD and funding questionable science) until it’s no longer profitable.

Sorry thats a lame Strawman argument. Scientists are humans hence corruptible like anyone else. There are no noble savages.

Of course humans are corruptible. But are all humans equally suspect? If your wallet is missing and the only suspects are a convicted thief and a noted philanthropist, who are you going to question first? We’re dealing with organizations (again, like the AFP) that have a known history of trying to confuse the public about the state of science (tobacco and asbestos come to mind).

Everything else is a fear based strawman…. and please don’t pretend to care for the third world because they are already being screwed over to pay for your western guilt about some invisible gas that is the basis for life.

Oh… I feel stupid now. I thought I was having an actual debate with a person, but now I see that I was just arguing with a collection of dismissive talking points.

Peter Pserp(#126), do you really expect to be taken seriously by presenting laleva dot org as a source to validate your perspective??? That place is full of more moonbat wingnut alt-med science deniers than “Above Top Secret”.

Really! Go read some of the articles.

EDIT: Wow! Teh stoopid grows; it is also anti-vaccine.
I have only perused the site for a few moments, but the stoopid at that place burns.

Peter PSerp:
“Seriously dude what was all that about? alt-med? never heard of it?!”

Oh I think you have. You may not know it, but you have.

“The claim was:
“The validity of climate science is as solid as that of current cancer research (for example). Do we see such objection to cancer-research science?

He was conflating climate research with some perceived holy grail in current cancer research that was never criticised.”

Well, no he wasn’t. He was pointing out, I think, that cancer research contains a similar range of uncertainties (as do most sciences) yet they aren’t picked apart by the popular media as though such uncertainties are fatal to whatever overall theory. Nor are their emails stolen and cherry picked for the purposes of character assassination.
You can attack just about any science in this fashion and do the same kind of PR damage over the perfection of its knowledge, and much of the medical conspiracy brigade have tried that from time to time. But never with quite the success of the climate denial machine.

“Climate interventions?! hahahaha yes we really do need to sit down with Mother Nature and tell her she has a serious problem and we are here to help!
The hubris of those who suggest that we should get into geo-engineering without understanding its unintentional consequences is astounding. We don’t even understand fully how climate even works!”

Hey you brought it up. I was arguing against it. I can’t think what else you could be talking about in this passage: -“We do not need to do anything right now in terms of adaptation or mitigation. And since we do not have any crystal balls, a much better approach will be to focus our funds and energies on specifics as and when required.”
You literally could not be talking about anything else. Besides, we have something specific to focus on. The whole reason people want to act now is because, without some large scale technological intervention, changing our behaviour on carbon emissions could take 100yrs to turn things around. You want to wait until we have something more concrete before we do anything at all. By then large scale technological intervention will be the only option.
If that’s not what you are talking about, I really don’t think you know what you are talking about.

“In any case the earth will continue on irrespective of us… we might all die out through our own meddling but it will be no different to the thousands of species that go extinct every day that we have no impact on whatsoever and don’t even realise they exist.”

Yeah, well good to know you’re on our side. Who would take your advice on this? I mean, seriously.

Why does anyone have to be the ‘face’ of global warming? What should be happening is the science presented, and something is done about it. We don’t have ‘faces’ for other science issues. Anyway, if there had to be one, I think that’s what the IPCC is for; presenting the science as a representation of the whole field. I think actually what you’re looking for is an ideal situation, which of course, isn’t possible. You act as if there is one movement, one opinion, one solution, whereas of course like anything else, a group of people (even if they’re all scientists agreeing with the same overall premise) are on a spectrum. I doubt any one scientist would really feel comfortable speaking on behalf of the rest, nor on behalf of the political/social solutions which should for the most part be democratically decided and implemented.

@Peter Pserp

You seem to have come up with a false dichotomy (lots of those in this thread). Why can’t we help the poor and disadvantaged whilst also cleaning up the carbon pollution? And yes, there is urgency on AGW, since it is already happening and things cannot be stopped simply by pulling a plug somewhere: the effects will be long-lasting and that’s even if we stop all carbon pollution right this second. Meanwhile, this will affect the communities you are so willing to defend. How do you reduce poverty and increase education when the communities are incapable of growing food and/or too busy migrating to a better climate to worry about their ABCs?

Its not changing so fast that we humans can’t deal with it.

Unless of course we don’t deal with it, which is pretty much what you’re advocating. Oh but, you *do* want to deal with it, just when it’s conveniently too late to actually change anything.

If we are so great as to impact the climate, then we live with the consequences.

Unless of course those consequences end up killing people or making the economy even worse. But hey, those poor people, they’ll have books in place of food and no housing, so they’ll be ok. Let me guess… you’re not one of those poor people you’re defending, are you?

You can’t produce energy if you have no food or clean water, or are spending money on migration. Or the money and people to create technology/factories to build and run energy production plants. I guess you forgot about that stuff.

Everything else is a fear based strawman…. and please don’t pretend to care for the third world because they are already being screwed over to pay for your western guilt about some invisible gas that is the basis for life.

Speaking of strawmen, you come up with a good one there. … But the third world will be screwed over anyway if we ignore this issue, so I don’t know WTF you’re on about. (See above comments by other posters as to why this point is wrong for other reasons)

Good luck with that… everything is just happening by scattergun and its a waste of resources of monumental proportions.

Uhuh. And you need to realise that life is a little more complex than a one-size-fits-all-answer that you seem to desperately need. It’s fine to disagree with certain plans, but if you really think we should put all our eggs in one basket then apparently you have a very narrow view of how the real world works. We don’t solve education for the disadvantaged simply by building a school and crossing our fingers people will attend. We also solve it by providing books and other materials, along with creating incentives for teachers to work in worse-paid positions and locations, along with raising awareness in first world countries, and also fixing other related issues (ie. improving roads or drop-out rates, etc). Your so-called scattergun approach is used for the exact same things you say you want fixed.

In any case the earth will continue on irrespective of us… we might all die out through our own meddling but it will be no different to the thousands of species that go extinct every day that we have no impact on whatsoever and don’t even realise they exist

So you’re all for saving the poor and disadvantaged, but those other species, well if they die out, that’s their problem? (Ignoring the fact that many species are dying because of our actions anyway – some unrelated to AGW)

The rest of your comments are hyperbole-filled conspiracy theories, woo, and rehashed denier points that have been debunked a billion times already. You’ve supported none of it with evidence, and simply announce that it is so. Maybe you should try it again but with (reputable) sources.

(Chalk another data point to my hypothesis that most deniers are really just complaining about taxes/changing their own habits)

Seriously if you can do accurate long range weather forecasting then you can make a lot of money.
It’s a hard problem and its not something you can just plug into some computer model.

The AGW people would have you believe that they can make predictions out to 30 or even 100 years!
A timeframe that means we have no choice but to rely on faith that the high priests are right?

Well if you believe that I have a bridge I’d like to sell you.

“Counter-intuitively, climate is easier to predict then weather, because it’s the sum of a lot of chaotic weather events that are averaged together. You could compare it to predicting a coin flip. Your odds of choosing a single flip correctly are only 50%, however, if you flip a coin 100 times, and you predict that heads will come up 40-60 times, you’ll almost certainly be right.”

I really really hope you don’t work in any numerical or statistical job that involves public safety.

“In any case, the validity of the science is unrelated to the question of whether prevention or adaptation is a better strategy. Climate science tells us what is happening, not the best course of action to take.”

How does it tell us what is happening?
The myriad of models they have cannot even accurately recreate the past let alone predict the future. You have heard of Garbage In, Garbage Out I presume?

“Seriously? This is possibly the least supportable thing I’ve read today. What’s your evidence that there’s significantly more money to be had for climate science then for any other discipline?”

Open your eyes.
Its not just about pure climate science… every academic field is trying to find some possible tie in to AGW so as to get on the research grant gravy train.
I’ve seen one group that claimed that global warming was going to makes us more depressed and they should study the impacts of AGW on mental health! FFS!

“And what’s your evidence that industry-funded think tanks that publish contrarian opinion are going to reward scientists less then the typical grant sources?”

It’s not about what they get paid.
If one of those think tanks produce biased rubbish science (as they are prone to do), why would I want to acknowledge them even if it may notionally support some of my views because its unsupportable. If they produced a solid piece of work then I would of course be favourable to it. Its all about the science done and not the people behind it.

“Why attack the science (when, for all the scrutiny, it keeps being vindicated)”

What planet are you on? If it was always being vindicated as you say.. if as some others say that the science is settled move on.. well we can save a lot of money by not needing to fund them anymore!
The point being that its not settled, far from it, so people continue to do research on it.

“I’m curious, where do you get the idea that climate change research is just swimming in moolah? Perhaps it is, but I haven’t seen any evidence.”

It is literally sucking the life out other out of favour academic research areas (unless they can get some AGW angle in there somehow).

As to personal enrichment, please do some googling on how much James Hansen has been getting on the side and not declaring…
Or Pachauri. Look at the dodgy companies Gore is involved with.

“Of course humans are corruptible. But are all humans equally suspect? If your wallet is missing and the only suspects are a convicted thief and a noted philanthropist, who are you going to question first?”

If they were both in front of me I’d get both to empty their pockets at the same time.

Seriously how did you think this philanthropist got all his money so he could then promote himself anyway?

You do realise that professional conmen rely on and manipulate biases such as these?
Be skeptical of everyone!

“We’re dealing with organizations (again, like the AFP) that have a known history of trying to confuse the public about the state of science (tobacco and asbestos come to mind).”

Don’t know them and never seen them spruiking any arguments on climate.

I’m sure that If i did come across it, it would be pretty obvious that their argument would be lame and obviously biased anyway so its discounted.

@154 Joseph G Says: November 24th, 2011 at 11:14 am

“Oh… I feel stupid now. I thought I was having an actual debate with a person, but now I see that I was just arguing with a collection of dismissive talking points.”

Don’t feel stupid… but I wasn’t the one to construct the strawman.

@155 Solius Says: November 24th, 2011 at 11:42 am

“Peter Pserp(#126), do you really expect to be taken seriously by presenting laleva dot org as a source to validate your perspective???”

Do you expect to be taken seriously by using an ad hominem/guilt by association type argument?

I knew about the NZ story and did a quick google to find a site that had some reference links on that particular story. end of story.

I didn’t even recognise this site you mentioned and had to search back to my post…
I wouldn’t know this laleva.org from a piece of crap.

“Really! Go read some of the articles.”

Yes you really should go read the specific story I was referring to and some of the video links.
If you want to waste your time on other crap on their site, up to you.

@156 ligne Says: November 24th, 2011 at 11:58 a

“both are equally bad. and if you’re referring to the 1970s global cooling “scare”, that was entirely a media construct.”

My friend the media are always fed the narrative. They certainly wouldn’t have made it up without someone feeding them (for whatever purpose)

@157 ligne Says: November 24th, 2011 at 12:03 pm

“yeah. and a clear liquid that’s the basis for life couldn’t have any negative impacts either, even in abnormally large quantities. could it? oh.”

Yes dihydrogen monoxide is very toxic at high quantities!

But you do realise what minuscule percentage of the overall atmosphere is CO2 right?

Seriously am much more afraid of CO than CO2. CO will definitely kill you!

But you do realise what minuscule percentage of the overall atmosphere is CO2 right?

With that single inane statement, you show your true colours. So, you are obviously completely ignorant of the basic physics required to participate in a rational discussion of climate change, with adults, on a science-oriented site. Why some of the regulars here are even bothering to engage with you is a complete mystery. You are just here to waste everyone’s time.

I particularly liked his line about being more worried about CO. Current atmospheric concentration of CO2 is well into the CO danger zone. In fact, the first symptoms of CO poisoning kick in at a concentration smaller by an order of magnitude than what Pserp describes as a ‘miniscule percentage’.

“[long range weather forecasting is] a hard problem and its not something you can just plug into some computer model.”

oh really? how do you suggest we do it?

i’d argue that the correct way to proceed is to create a model based on our understanding of how the system works, then fine-tuning it based on how skilful its predictions are. you know, like what every other field of science does.

but maybe we should just give up and wave around bits of seaweed instead.

That laleva site is horrifying. Whoever’s writing that thing is seriously worked up about vaccines. There’s a post ranting and raving about how everyone gives vaccines to children should be “lined up against the wall”. I believe the word “lynch” is used too, without any irony.

Really, this is the kind of stuff that makes nutbags snap and shoot doctors.

@165 ligne: I’d argue that the correct way to proceed is to create a model based on our understanding of how the system works, then fine-tuning it based on how skilful its predictions are. you know, like what every other field of science does.

@160 Peter Pserp: How does it tell us what is happening?
The myriad of models they have cannot even accurately recreate the past let alone predict the future. You have heard of Garbage In, Garbage Out I presume?

I’m not sure why I’m even still doing this. Bored and waiting for pie, I guess.
Seriously? Actually, their models can indeed recreate the past, and as time has gone by, they’ve also accurately predicted the future. That’s why most scientists who study this stuff are quite convinced that they’re on the right track. I don’t know where you’re getting your information about the mainstream models not working.

Its not just about pure climate science… every academic field is trying to find some possible tie in to AGW so as to get on the research grant gravy train.
[Citation Needed]

“And what’s your evidence that industry-funded think tanks that publish contrarian opinion are going to reward scientists less then the typical grant sources?”

It’s not about what they get paid.
If one of those think tanks produce biased rubbish science (as they are prone to do), why would I want to acknowledge them even if it may notionally support some of my views because its unsupportable. If they produced a solid piece of work then I would of course be favourable to it. Its all about the science done and not the people behind it.

Erm, it is about what they get paid. That’s what we were just talking about. I asked what made you think that industry think-tanks aren’t paying at least as well as government grants, and you wrote something about how rubbish science should be disregarded. I’m glad we agree on that point, but I fail to see what it has to do with what we were just talking about.

What planet are you on? If it was always being vindicated as you say.. if as some others say that the science is settled move on.. well we can save a lot of money by not needing to fund them anymore!
The point being that its not settled, far from it, so people continue to do research on it.

See, that’s just it – so many people are completed unswayed by “pretty damn sure,” that scientists need to work to prove that everything is super-duper-duper sure. Ironically, if it weren’t for industry pushback, climate science would probably be getting a lot less money at this point, as we’d have already moved to the “Ok, so what do we do about it?” stage.

Don’t know them and never seen them spruiking any arguments on climate.

Americans For Prosperity – They’re pretty influential here in the States. Funded by such luminaries as the Koch brothers, who also send money to folks like Fred Upton, chair of the House Energy and Commerce committee. Interestingly, Mr. Upton advocated action on global warming before receiving the contributions from the Kochs; afterwards he coauthored an essay with a spokesman for AFP, saying that he was “unconvinced” that global warming existed at all.
They’re just one such organization of several, but their history is pretty instructive.

He was conflating climate research with some perceived holy grail in current cancer research that was never criticised.
I countered by reference to the fact that objections do indeed exist thus the claim is flawed

Nice to know you remembered my name.

Oh, wait. You didn’t.

In fact, you did not counter my claim, you moved the goalposts. You conflated “cancer research” with “cancer treatment discovery” which are different, albeit related, things. I was discussing the former, not the latter.

The hubris of those who suggest that we should get into geo-engineering without understanding its unintentional consequences is astounding. We don’t even understand fully how climate even works!

So what? We have enough evidence to know that, if we don’t curb our emissions of GHGs or indulge in some form of geoengineering, then our modern civilisations will be changed beyond recognition within the next 100 years.

In any case the earth will continue on irrespective of us… we might all die out through our own meddling but it will be no different to the thousands of species that go extinct every day that we have no impact on whatsoever and don’t even realise they exist.

Again, in what way is this relevant? Are you happy to doom billions to die just so that you and millions of others like you don’t have to buy a car with a smaller engine, or pay a little extra for your domestic electricity because it comes from carbon-neutral generation, or whatever changes turn out to be necessary to sufficiently reduce our emissions of GHGs?

The “business as usual” scenario will lead to widespread famine and the loss of much low-lying land to the sea, including up to half of Bangladesh, much of Florida, bits of Louisiana (including New Orleans), up to a fifth of England (including most of London and much of England’s most fertile farmland), and significant chunks of countries such as the Netherlands and Denmark. Oh, and a sizeable chunk of Manhatten. The fine details of exactly when and to what extent this will come about are extremely difficult to predict, but all of the dozens of models agree that these are outcomes we should expect.

Where do you get off on dictating the kind of world in which my grandchildren must live?

The AGW people would have you believe that they can make predictions out to 30 or even 100 years!

Actually, Peter Pserp, so do astronomers. They can tell what year for example a solar eclipse or planetary conjunction or cometary appearence will be for hundreds of years to come.

They can predict the future with confidence and get it pretty right because they’re using good science – just as the climatologists do.

A timeframe that means we have no choice but to rely on faith that the high priests are right?

Well, you can always do the calculations yourself. Seriously. The data is, as has been pointed out already I think, freely available. Pretty sure I’ve even seen a site somewhere that helps you out in cretaing your own graphs and tables from the raw data.

(Anyone else remember the one I’m vaguely recalling here? Please?)

Of coures it helps if you’re willing to do a bit of reserach and study and prepared to think. Hard. If you really want to know there’s plenty of textbooks, lots of online lectures and lots of climatologists out there that are actually pretty apparoachable if you ask reasonable questions politely and are preapred to listen and learn. Or you can find many (most?) of the actual science papers themselves in legtimate peer-reviewed scientific journals (& some online) and if you want to check through them for errors, well be our guest. So, climatologists asking to be just taken on faith? Not at all.

Also There’s a HUGE difference between “High Preists” and scientists. Scientists have peer-review and face alot of critical analysis. They have to do experiments and perform calculations which are checked in a whole lot of ways by a whole lot of people. The scientific conculsions need to be verifiable, consistent, backed bby multiple studies, make testable predictions and a lot more stuff like that. High Preists? Not so much.

“First, who says scientists can’t predict the weather properly?” (#153 Joseph G -ed.) Seriously if you can do accurate long range weather forecasting then you can make a lot of money.It’s a hard problem and its not something you can just plug into some computer model.
Well if you believe that I have a bridge I’d like to sell you…. The myriad of models they have cannot even accurately recreate the past let alone predict the future. You have heard of Garbage In, Garbage Out I presume?

You think that Climate Scientists haven’t?

You think they don’t run a range of models and test them with simulating past conditions and match the models with the real world refining them so they get ever better. They’ve been doing this for some time.

PS. Click on my name for a good youtube video on this climate canard too.

Note though that a great many different groups and individuals have already analysed the data included the Koch-funded independent Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study (click on my name for clip on that) and they all come to the conclusion based on the maths and measurements that Human Induced Rapid Global Overheating (HIRGO) is indeed confirmed as the stark reality.

We may not like that reality, I don’t myself, but it *is* real and we do have to face up to that. Sooner or later.

There is no authority in science except evidence and we should all be suspicious of anyone who acts to hide anything.

Well, quite.

This sentence of yours pretty much proves the point I was trying to make.

You commented (126) about how Linus Pauling deserved respect because he is a double-Nobel prizewinner (unshared, in different fields, if memory serves). I say, no, he doesn’t, not if what he is claiming is wrong.

You slyly allude to hiding data. Tell me something: has any serious climate scientist ever had a request for raw data refused? I am not aware of any examples. The denialists make a lot of noise about Mann et al. refusing requests for raw data, but AFAICT, the only refusals have been to people who have no understanding of the required methodologies to abstract meaningful figures from raw data, and no serious intention of acquiring such an understanding.

BTW. Others here have already nicely taken care of many of the other things Peter Pserp has mentioned so I won’t go over old ground, well, not this time anyhow.

But I will just say there’s something almost oddly encouraging about this latest “climategate” revival attempt. Because it is so lame with so little there that if this is the very best the Climate Contrarians Deniers can do, their supposed strongest line of attack then .. Well, they really don’t have much at all left do they?

The denialists make a lot of noise about Mann et al. refusing requests for raw data, but AFAICT, the only refusals have been to people who have no understanding of the required methodologies to abstract meaningful figures from raw data, and no serious intention of acquiring such an understanding.

Further to that, what the denialists so ‘conveniently’ forget (no matter how many times it is explained to them!) is that that the majority of the FOIA requests directed at the Hadley CRU for raw temperature data were trying to get data that *CRU did not have permission to give out*. About 5% of the raw data is held by countries that want to be paid for it, to support their collection of said data.

They will give it to universities/scientists for free to further the cause of science, but the scientists are under strict obligation not to pass it on to 3rd parties without express consent. In fact, Phil Jones was, ironically, working very hard at the time Climategate broke to make this data available to all F.O.C. But do the denialists ever acknowledge the reality of why (most of) their FOIA requests were being legitimately refused? Of course not. That would be the honest thing to do.

Also, what Nigel says. All of the raw station data have been available to anyone who wants to download it for about 4 months now. So where is that famous Auditor when you need him? Time for the denialists to put up or shut up!

Tell me something: has any serious climate scientist ever had a request for raw data refused? I am not aware of any examples. The denialists make a lot of noise about Mann et al. refusing requests for raw data, but AFAICT, the only refusals have been to people who have no understanding of the required methodologies to abstract meaningful figures from raw data, and no serious intention of acquiring such an understanding.

This way lies danger. I don’t think there is any such thing as a Serious Climate Scientist Licence, nor should there be. Judge based on publication. In order to judge based on publication (and also to replicate), the data needs to be available, and NOT just to those judged “serious”. Otherwise, we simply end up doing “I’m right, trust me” science. That is not good science. It’s not fraud, it’s not illegal, and it might even be quite common, but it’s not good.

I think the second part of your comment gets to the core of this debate, even farther than I suspect you realize. I would summarize:

– overall, the evidence strongly supports climate change
– overall, the evidence strongly supports global warming
– overall, the evidence strongly supports anthropogenic global warming
– these changes are going to demand, long-term, deep and expensive changes in the way everyone on this planet lives
– in order to best judge the most appropriate changes, the science involved has to be held to the highest standards of science

But – just because Mann’s final results agree with the majority of the evidence does not automatically make his work good science. The scientific criticism of his work (and other’s related work) is precisely the point you are cautioning about – that the methods used to extract meaningful figures from raw data are not statistically meaningful. The strongest concern is that his methods wil extract apparently interesting results from meaningless data. And you will likely have to be deeply versed in understanding valid statistical methods to understand this field of study, something it’s not clear that even Mann is fully appreciative of.

The rest of the summary?

– there is no evidence that Mann et al have done anything illegal
– there is no evidence that Mann et al have done anything fraudulent
– wrong methods + right results does not make good science
– Mann’s work should not be included in the evidence to support global warming

As far as I can tell, most people want this debate to be much bigger than it should be. We’re well on the road to global climate change (which for many regions will mean warming), and dealing with those changes is going to be expensive and time-consuming. Nobody likes to spend time or money needlessly, and the demand that the science be certain should not be unexpected. But the science will only be as certain as science ever gets – it’s the demand that the science be perfect which is unreasonable.

When it comes time to make changes, we’re going to need to open up the research, and try to understand not just that the climate is changing, but also understand the ways in which the underlying mechanisms operate to get to the final result. An incorrect understanding of the details will lead us to make wasteful and useless changes. That’s why it’s so important that the science we accept into the evidence be the best science possible.

But – just because Mann’s final results agree with the majority of the evidence does not automatically make his work good science. The scientific criticism of his work (and other’s related work) is precisely the point you are cautioning about – that the methods used to extract meaningful figures from raw data are not statistically meaningful. The strongest concern is that his methods wil extract apparently interesting results from meaningless data. And you will likely have to be deeply versed in understanding valid statistical methods to understand this field of study, something it’s not clear that even Mann is fully appreciative of.

Wow. That’s some really subtle concern trolling, but I see what you did there.

It’s 13 years after the fact, and McIntyre and his ilk just can’t let go, can they? So here we go again for the umpteenth time. The facts of the matter are:

1. If you use non-centred PCA like Mann did, the ‘interesting’ PC is usually PC1.
2. If you use centred PCA like McIntyre insists you must do, then you must be prepared to consider PC’s other than PC1 (which McIntyre refuses to do, because it gets rid of the ‘hockey stick’, which is what he must do no matter what it takes).
3. Mann’s non-centred PCA *does not generate ‘hockey sticks’ from completely random data*. This is total bullsh#t. McIntyre way-overcooked the persistence of the red noise he generated (to artificially create ‘hockey stick’ shaped PCs), and then he also cherry-picked the 100 most ‘hockey stick’-shaped PCs out of the 10,000 he generated just to stitch up Mann. Wegman did the rest, without doing any due diligence *at all* on McIntyre’s work.

Because, lest you forget, this whole thing with red noise is supposed to be about randomly simulating what happens in nature, and then trying to see if your statistical analysis methods can still separate the signal from the noise.

Further to that, nearly every paleoclimate proxy study done since then, be it with coral, ocean sediments, boreholes, etc. comes up with similar ‘hockey sticks’. Even when the tree ring analysis is re-done with ‘conventional’ PCA, surprise: a ‘hockey stick’ (and it’s not substantively different from the original MBH98 one, either)!

Give it up, already. Your horse is not only beaten to death, it’s been six feet under for a long time now.

“but AFAICT, the only refusals have been to people who have no understanding of the required methodologies to abstract meaningful figures from raw data, and no serious intention of acquiring such an understanding.”

Point of clarification:

“but AFAICT, the only refusals have been to people who had already demonstrated they had no understanding of the required methodologies to abstract meaningful figures from raw data, and no serious intention of acquiring such an understanding.”

And that was years ago. As someone has already pointed out, the data and code was all released 4 months ago (at least the data and code that hadn’t been released years ago), yet the same people who were screaming at the top of their lungs that they needed the raw data and code did absolutely nothing with it once it was available to them.

In other words, the fact that they totally ignored the data once it was given to them shows that previous assessments of the honesty of those requests were spot-on. I am not sure fighting the requests was the best tact, the scientists in question had a choice between been dishonestly quote-mined or dishonestly smeared, but personally I probably would have gone with quote-mined.

“You commented (126) about how Linus Pauling deserved respect because he is a double-Nobel prizewinner (unshared, in different fields, if memory serves).”

chemistry and peace. both of them truly deserved. though as he pointed out, the second was much less remarkable than the first, since one was a one in several billion chance, and the other a mere one in a few hundred chance.

then again, i’ve heard it suggested that there is no idea, however mental, that isn’t supported by at least two Nobel prize-winners. (Cf. Kary Mullis — deserving Nobel prize winner, but also an AIDS denialist and astrology fan who believes he’s met talking raccoons.)

“AFAICT, the only refusals have been to people who have no understanding of the required methodologies to abstract meaningful figures from raw data, and no serious intention of acquiring such an understanding.”

A tree falls in the forest and a hiker hears it for the first time. they ask the person they are hiking with what that sound was. The friend replies “That is it was just the wind.”

Later the hiker is walking through the woods alone and comes upon a lumberjack. The hiker watches him cut down and tree and sees it fall, they also notice that the wind is rather loud today, for a moment then it dies down.

They mention to the lumberjack that it is amazing that such a large tree could fall all the way to the ground, breaking several branched and other trees, without so much as a peep.

The lumberjack looks puzzled for a moment. Then asks “Where do you think all that racket came from.” The hiker replies, “Everybody knows that is just the wind blowing.”

A debate ensues in which the lumberjack attempts to explain that the noise was in fact the tree and not the wind.

The hiker, after being unmoved by the argument, decides to end the conversation by requesting the lumberjack provide more evidence and proof of his position, and that he can mail it for review.

Later, the hiker calls up his friend from earlier and says to him, “Can you believe I met a guy today that thinks trees make noise when they fall down? He even tried to prove it did but I couldn’t make out the sounds through all the background noise. Well he was a lumberjack, probably gets paid to believe that crap.”

ok well, you claim, “they” released the data, can you serve up a link so I can down load it and make an informed decision myself, after all this data is only numerical in nature, so it can be statistically analysed and with a program like megastat, that I have. I should be able to resolve the data questions for myself. Remember the data after all is said and done is only numbers, lets see where they lead us.

There’s a conspiracy alright, but the typical denialist is too bone-headed to realize it isn’t on the part of the climate scientists. The financing and activism that constantly prods those gullible numb-skulled denialists to swallow everything on command is provided by Big Oil and its principle stock holders. The very idea that these denialist tools like to view themselves as exemplars of rational and independent thinking and skepticism is a joke. Worst of all, they’re insincere and they’re proud of it. They don’t often bother looking at the science, but even if they do, they simply regurgitate their contrarianist lines or make things up. Even if they accept the data, they go out of their way to misinterpret and mischaracterize the evidence. They are liars. They wouldn’t change their mind if they tripped over evidence. THEY DON’T CARE ABOUT EVIDENCE. They only care about being “right” and showing how tough and resilient their resolve is “proves” they must be right. But this merely indicates to non-denialists that they’re just dim-witted.

So the question to the typical GW denialist would be this: why do you suppose the Big Oil Corporations are spending so much money to keep you ignorant? What are THEY worried about? That we might “waste” money by cutting back on greenhouse gas emissions? That is, THEIR prospective future profits? What do THEY know that you don’t? Maybe they’re worried that you might discover that the climate scientists are right. Why else would they need to keep pumping billions of dollars into this ‘GW-is-a-hoax’ HOAX? There’s only one credible answer: $$$. And if anyone doubts this scenario, compare their profits with what climate scientists earn. Does anyone seriously think the climate science community can compete with Big Oil Bucks??? Case rests.

And before you start complaining about the word “subset”, please read the whole explanation, specifically this:

“The stations that we have released are all those in the Met Office Hadley Centre and University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit gridded land surface temperature database (CRUTEM3) except 19 stations from Poland for which the national meteorological service which owns the underlying station data has not given permission to release.”

This fluff of Phil screams denial of the obvious. The “relativity of science.”

Einstein should be questioned as he couldn’t come up with a unification theory. You can’t question the consensus as they are climate scientists! This is about as pretentious as- Trust me, I’m a doctor! Uh, gotta run, ‘tee’-time with Obama. So if you aren’t a member of the good ol science cartel your aren’t going to be recognized in your endeavors.

The AGW believers will tell you there’s no money behind the science. So is that why GE and BP are funding these groups, is that why they are pushing solar and wind farms first pioneered by ENRON, which got huge support by Al Gore the seminary scientist? Au contraire, it’s the science of money and the tax payer run gravy train! Climate default swaps in the works! What, me trust the UN? Hey Mainerd, where’s my Noble Peace Prize? Obama and Al gore got it, so much for Nobel.

Humans have as much effect on climate as a fat man trying to create big waves by doing a belly flop in the Great Lakes. So don’t give me your fat momma jokes.

President Eisenhower gave a speech warning about the industrial- military-politico complex. What’s not well know is in that same speech he warned about the science- industrial- political complex. There’s a difference between a self servicing public servant and one who serves the public! Scientists are not gods, they are people too subject to all the failings and temptations thereof.

It doesn’t matter who released the emails, it’s public property and therefore the public have a right to know and have access to! Just like they should be able to attend those back room committee meetings on Congress.

La-la-la, I can’t hear you Phil of all the greenhouse fluff that fit to puff.
Peter Pserp and 123 Joseph G, Bravo on the obvious. To the AGWers, pretty sad you don’t know the difference between CO and CO2. Just like you don’t know the difference between pseudo science and real science. Stay away from copious amounts of dihydrogen monoxide, it a killer!

This way lies danger. I don’t think there is any such thing as a Serious Climate Scientist Licence, nor should there be. Judge based on publication. In order to judge based on publication (and also to replicate), the data needs to be available, and NOT just to those judged “serious”. Otherwise, we simply end up doing “I’m right, trust me” science. That is not good science. It’s not fraud, it’s not illegal, and it might even be quite common, but it’s not good.

You make a good point here. I was, it seems, overlooking the fact that I was instituting a value judgement by what I was saying.

However, if data cannot be made available online to download (as is the dase here but was not the case until but recently) – i.e. if a scientist must respond individually to each request for raw data – then an organised group of people who oppose that scientist’s research could essentially cripple that scientist in what amounts to a DDOS- style attack. There needs to be some restriction on frivolous requests for raw data.

Perhaps there is a way to do this that involves no value judgement, but all I can think of right now is to respond only if the person requesting the data has some legitimate affiliation (such as a relevant academic or government department).

When it comes time to make changes, we’re going to need to open up the research, and try to understand not just that the climate is changing, but also understand the ways in which the underlying mechanisms operate to get to the final result. An incorrect understanding of the details will lead us to make wasteful and useless changes. That’s why it’s so important that the science we accept into the evidence be the best science possible.

I disagree.

In the absence of unlimited time in which to understand all the relevant mechanisms, the very worst thing to do is nothing.

The time to act over AGW was 1995. Had we acted – globally – then to limit GHG emissions, we would have been in a far better position now, with only very modest changes to our lifestyles and business practices.

Even so, the sooner we do something to reduce human-originated GHG emissions, the better. At least some of the consequences of AGW are now inevitable. But not all of the possible copnsequences are inevitable. The sooner we act, the more we avoid.

@ Scottar: I notice no where do you even mention evidence. That is what matters here. If denialists actually had something substantial to offer, we would listen. The problem isn’t questioning scientists, it is ignoring evidence, something you did a great job of in your own post.

Ed Minchau, WLR Paul, Peter pserp, Scottar, and a few other drive by’s:

I would like to thank you all. You are doing a great service for the world and for the cause of climate science awareness.

Like many people who try to think for themselves rather than accept the ready-made answers of others, I read a lot about a great variety of subjects and do my best to find accurate and useful information before coming to any conclusions. You brave, honest skeptics have demonstrated again here what I see in every single Climate Change thread on this website…

That you, and every other science denier I’ve come across, are clueless, dishonest, mouth-frothing, self-righteous, semi-literate, completely ignorant, deluded, paranoid, and pants-on-head stupid… and that you have already chosen a pre-fabricated “side” which you will cling to like a true believer lost at sea with nothing but an inflatible bible.

Not one of you can offer anything other than insulting accusations of completely unevidenced conspiracy in support of your own various unevidenced conspiracy theories. You parrot long-debunked talking points, you actively LIE about the secret motivations of scientists whose work you don’t even bother to check out, and as far as I can tell you do it entirely so that you can escape the pathetic emptiness of your meaningless lives and see yourselves as some kind of heroic revolutionary thinkers, struggling against the evil machinations of “Big Clima” or whatever you deluded fruit loops call your imaginary enemies.

Normally, I would ask you to please study the available evidence, and thoughtfully and honestly reconsider your opinions like a reasonable adult. Realizing that such a suggestion is probably completely futile, I instead ask you to keep paddling your crazy canoe up that creek of crap you’re spewing. You are making sure that people like me get a good solid idea of just how silly you are. Thanks!

A couple of notes…Peter Pserp, it really seems like your heart is in the right place….keep working on it in a spirit of honesty (not a spirit of AHA! GOTCHA, stoopid paid off scientists!) and you’ll probably do alright. There are a lot of problems in the world, and choosing to be an activist about one of them doesn’t mean that you are automatically an enemy of other activists who choose other goals.

Scottar: Quoting stupid stunts off Penn & Teller’s tv show and anything off of Coast to Coast (loonybin)radio DOES NOT make you look smart or well informed. It makes you look like you could benefit from deep-breathing meditation exercises and counseling.

Remember guys, life is not an episode of the X-Files. Climate science is not a fantasy film called “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade of the Al Gore-Hippy Communist-Tree Hugger -1%-Jewish Banker-Monsanto World Domination League.” Lying and spouting BS on the internet does not make you a special, enlightened individual. Grow the hell up or prepare to spend the rest of your life being justly eye-rolled and ignored.

Someone here said that scientists are not supposed to be impartial, that only science is. But scientists have a duty to be scientifically honest which these “scientists” from East Anglia and Penn State are clearly not. I am a moderate skeptic and accept the possibility that man-made global warming is real, even if my main worry is an impending glacial era astronomically due at any time now. Scientists who place their quasi-religious belief above the truth don’t deserve any respect or attention, even if they might possibly be right. If someone says in private that lying for “good” scientific causes is justified, then you can’t believe him anymore. If it happens to be right, it would be like a fast clock that is correct twice a day. Any faux scientist involved in this Climagate belongs in oblivion forever. Surely there must be better warmist out there.

Welcome to the cold, miserable business of politics. As Hacker says, in Yes Minister, “I don’t want the truth! I want something I can tell parliament!”

This is the price of the politicisation of science. It’s the price paid when it stopped being about what is real, and started telling people what to do. And please do not pretend that this has not happened. Consider the case of people like Lovelock etc.

Now, chaps like Scottar are not trying to win a scientific, but a political debate – a debate about the real power over human lives. They’re going to fight with whatever they can, don’t kid yourself.

Scientists who place their quasi-religious belief above the truth don’t deserve any respect or attention, even if they might possibly be right. If someone says in private that lying for “good” scientific causes is justified, then you can’t believe him anymore.

What evidence do you have that thousands of peer reviewed papers that demonstrate the climate is changing at an unprecedented rate in the past few decades, and that mankind is a primary cause of that change, constitutes climate scientists ‘lying’?

All you seem to have there is a wild conspiracy theory with absolutely no evidence to support it.

If someone says in private that lying for “good” scientific causes is justified, then you can’t believe him anymore

Please cite anywhere where any “climategate” email has suggested lying about anything.

And please, I beg you, check the quote with a non-denialist source to see if it is being misrperesented. If you post another long-debunked, out-of-context misrepresentation like “hide the decline” you are just going to make yourself look like a total idiot.

@ lonnie: It has been a couple days, how is the analysis of the data I linked to going? It took two days for another group to reproduce the results, surely after demanding the data so fervently you have at least started looking at it.

I’ve always found this “statistic” interesting for what it says about climate science as a whole. Uniformity in science is but a temporary thing and it is perhaps the best indicator for the health of the discipline as one can have. It suggests that the disciplines ability to challenge itself and its base assumptions is rather limited and will remain so until someone upsets the apple cart. In short, it suggests that the discipline has perhaps stagnated.

One could say that prior to Einstein publishing his special theory of relativity in 1905 that 97% of physicists believed Newtonian physics was the primary description of how the universe moved, if not outright functioned. Einstein upset more than 200 years of accepted doctrine and revolutionized his own field and many of the physical sciences. He even upset some of those in the political realm with the concept of relativeness of all things. The development of theories in quantum mechanics further revolutionized physics and we now “believe” that Newtonian physics is but a subset of the discipline.

Arguing that climate change is real (which it may or may not be, we won’t “know” for 50 to 100 years) because a majority of scientists in a new discipline, relatively speaking, agree that it is merely suggests that the discipline itself is stagnant and ripe for fundamental change. In my view, consensus does not make for healthy science; openness and competition among competing ideas does.

Sadly, there can be no true debate or dialogue between warring camps of true believers, which aptly describes the relationship between those who favour the theory of anthropomorphic climate change and those that do not. The debate gets us no where.

I’ve no doubt that we’ll all look back at this debate in 50 or 100 years and laugh at ourselves, perhaps in joy or perhaps in tears, for our current views and opinion on climate change.

I doubt anyone’s still reading, and apologies for not turning up sooner… Apologies for repetition if someone else has covered these points, I’m going through one comment at a time.

@Peter #160

The AGW people would have you believe that they can make predictions out to 30 or even 100 years!

Or you could just try reading the papers and understanding the science behind it all. If you trust someone to understand the science to build a computer, but can’t be assed learning how to do it yourself (or it’s too complicated to learn quickly), then why is this any different?

Well if you believe that I have a bridge I’d like to sell you.

I’d be happy to buy a bridge from someone who is a bridge-builder. Obviously, expertise in a field counts for something.

How does it tell us what is happening?
The myriad of models they have cannot even accurately recreate the past let alone predict the future. You have heard of Garbage In, Garbage Out I presume?

You’re doing your best to avoid dealing with this point aren’t you. Ignore the use of models for a moment. These are predictive issues. Focus on the previous data sets: ie. tree ring, ice core, recorded temperatures, etc. Take the data up to this second, and it shows an increase in temperature. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that a steady increase in past temperatures is likely to lead to further increases down the road. Modelling is more about accuracy of that point, and how/where it will affect the world.

I’ve seen one group that claimed that global warming was going to makes us more depressed and they should study the impacts of AGW on mental health! FFS!

Without actually seeing what you’re talking about, it could be one (or more) of three things: 1, that this statement is said by people who don’t have science to back it up or (more likely) someone anti-AGW who created a strawman; 2, that it might happen seeing as how people will lose jobs, lose food/water, and needs to migrate which generally makes people depressed; 3, a Seasonal Affective Disorder issue, although I can’t see how it would necessarily affect people since it’s usually due to cold weather not hot.

However: you seem to have problems with related issues to do with AGW, none of which have anything to do with the actual science, but more to do with socioeconomical and political issues. That’s fine, but as has been pointed out, they are separate issues altogether.

If one of those think tanks produce biased rubbish science (as they are prone to do), why would I want to acknowledge them even if it may notionally support some of my views because its unsupportable. If they produced a solid piece of work then I would of course be favourable to it. Its all about the science done and not the people behind it.

I wonder if you’ve ever actually read the papers, or you’ve just read the talking points on anti-AGW sites. You’re typing on a computer, which means at some point you’ve accepted that science works and that most scientists aren’t corrupt – if they were, your computer wouldn’t work.

You keep talking about how it’s about the science being done and not the people, and yet your main point of contention *is* about the people. Pick an argument, you can’t subscribe to both.

If it was always being vindicated as you say.. if as some others say that the science is settled move on.. well we can save a lot of money by not needing to fund them anymore!

Yeah, because that’s how the world works. Hey everyone, Newton figured out gravity, there’s no need to fund any more studies! Want to learn more about dinosaurs? No need, we’ve already found out they exist, and that’s more than enough info! Sheesh, you are more and more sounding like a crank by the minute.

It is literally sucking the life out other out of favour academic research areas (unless they can get some AGW angle in there somehow).

I love how you back this up with sources. I seriously need one large bumper sticker here… [citation needed].

As to personal enrichment, please do some googling on how much James Hansen has been getting on the side and not declaring…
Or Pachauri. Look at the dodgy companies Gore is involved with.

See above. And of course, Gore is a scientist so we should all think AGW isn’t happening because he’s involved. /snark. Ahem, yep it’s really about the science for you isn’t it?

I’m sure that If i did come across it, it would be pretty obvious that their argument would be lame and obviously biased anyway so its discounted.

Funny all those talking points you’re using come from these exact same people. You may not have heard of them, but you’ve certainly not been able to recognise their arguments for ‘lame’ and ‘biased’.

Don’t feel stupid… but I wasn’t the one to construct the strawman.

LOL. See above, though I doubt it will sink in.

Do you expect to be taken seriously by using an ad hominem/guilt by association type argument?

Please expect a bill for a new irony meter. You just broke mine.

My friend the media are always fed the narrative. They certainly wouldn’t have made it up without someone feeding them (for whatever purpose)

Oh seriously. Now we have the ‘biased media’ canard. Is there any pseudoscience/crank argument you don’t use?

But you do realise what minuscule percentage of the overall atmosphere is CO2 right?

Yet another talking point. Yes, we do know. It’s also not about the ‘miniscule’ percentage, but about the fact that it’s like a snowball effect; CO2 creates more problems because as we heat, more C02 is released, etc etc. If you’d actually have looked at the science, you’d have seen that point being made several times.

Having spent a lot of time correcting people about copyright on the net, I think it just never occurs to the deniers that it might exist for scienitific data. There’s plenty of people who’d just assume that data collected is available to all because one of the tenets of the scientific method is openness. I do agree though, this point is often not only overlooked but completely ignored. But frankly, most people don’t give a sh*t about copyright. And of course, the only people who do care about releasing the original data tend not to be the ones who’ll understand/use it (or care to come back and discuss it when links are posted for them to read)

#181 Chris S

As far as I can tell, most people want this debate to be much bigger than it should be

How big is big? What are the issues that you think are missing from the debate, because I certainly can’t think of any…?

And you say the science should be the best possible, but then also state that expecting perfection is unreasonable…

#193 Scottar

You’re a poe, right? Your first paragraph, if not, is hilariously wrong – not even wrong… Sigh… speaking of regurgitating talking points. And if you’d bothered to read the thread before posting, you might have seen they were already knocked over with actual reality and science.

And once you got to the point of mentioning that private emails are somehow public… well, you’re too obvious to be a poe and too laughable to be reasonable. La la la is right.

#198 Cristolbal26 obviously doesn’t have a crystal ball, otherwise they would have been able to foresee the replies that had already been posted that dealt with all their usual canards.

#203, Antispin

In short, it suggests that the discipline has perhaps stagnated.

Actually what it means is that the majority of climate scientists have reviewed the evidence and find the evidence compelling in one direction. It suggests that they tentatively consider AGW to be a real thing; and if/when new evidence comes along that strongly suggests the opposite, and it meets peer review, then they’d change their position. Just because ‘doctrine’ has been upset before doesn’t mean much of anything. Einstein didn’t cause Newtonian physics to be thrown out, he caused scientists to consider that it was incomplete.

Besides which, your argument, like all the others, doesn’t address the actual science but the issues surrounding the science. Come back when you have some evidence that will upset the cart. Until then, it’s just hot air.

In my view, consensus does not make for healthy science; openness and competition among competing ideas does.

Sadly, no one seems to be producing any science that does compete, maybe because the evidence lines up? Like I said, create your own data and then come back and argue about it.

Crowley:
Phil, thanks for your thoughts – guarantee there will be no dirty laundry in the open.

Jones:
I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process

Jones:
Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get – and has to be well hidden. I’ve discussed this with the main funder (US Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.

Conrad’s solution to all of this bickering is that we should be making love, not climate war. Or at least you young ones should.

Do you really think you’ll change anyones minds down here in the bleg depths of this half-rate bleg on a half-rate magazine’s site? What you want to be doing is convincing your cohorts to take of their sweaters, and not because of global warming, mind.

Me, I’m too old for all of that. In fact, I well remember the 70s and those damned winters filled with snow and ice. I think it’s the sun what did it then and it’s the sun what does it now.

Me, I’m adding to my ammo collection, specifically the calibers with a little more reach. I’m adding another 5,000-gallon disel tank, and I’m forsaking the retaining wall this time.

I’ll be snacking high on the food chain and blowing my share of carbon into the bicker-filled ozone when it all freezes over.

Me, I’m too old for all of that. In fact, I well remember the 70s and those damned winters filled with snow and ice. I think it’s the sun what did it then and it’s the sun what does it now.

Yeah, why actually use data when we can just pull stuff out of thing air? Why bother to look at the data we have on solar output (which has either been steady or slightly decreasing over the time period)? Why try to measure the various inputs and outputs and see what is going on? The best way to make progress is just to make stuff up and stick to it no matter what the evidence says. That is how we got our technology so advanced, right? Ignore the facts, ignore the data, just go on gut feeling.

Way to completely avoid the point. Would you be happy if you found out your architect built your house based on gut feeling rather than actually doing the calculations regarding the weights and stresses? What if the breaks on your car were designed based solely on gut feeling rather than calculations of the friction and torque involved? I bet you wouldn’t be very thrilled with to find that out. Yet you are willing to settle an issue that affects every human being on the planet with nothing more than a hunch. How does that make any sense whatsoever?

I’m discussing with two denialists on a blog (it’s in Swedish) and the reasoning goes like this (quickly translated with Google translate):

”The burden of proof lies with you and those who claim that CO2 gas has a greenhouse effect because they did not present any intelligible mechanism or process that explains how CO2 gas in the atmosphere increases heat on earth. The parable also taking to the water droplets in clouds do not seem to be when applied to CO2 gas. We get excuses instead of answers and explanations from scientists on this crucial issue and that is why I and many others, concluded that global warming theory is not sensible, and it can be relegated to the pile of nonsense-science, together with the already discarded the theory of global cooling, which we were served thirty years ago.
Common Sense, Martin, makes me confident that I’m right.”

and the other:

”What is the mechanism of carbon dioxide famous thermogenic effect. Tell us! Tell us! I’ll listen. Then talk about how you have measured this and with what measurement accuracy. And how have you in this case, pure and isolated the effect of cloud formation and sunspots effect?”

If you have time – what would your response to these two paragraphs be?

If you don’t read the news, your uninformed, if you just read the MSM, your misinformed.

It’s not just data, it the science behind the data, and how it is acquired and used.

Bad or incomplete data is GIGO. Big pharma does this all the time.

Did you not read the Tim Ball post link I gave?

surfacestation.org

If you don’t understand the physics your going to get skunked. If you ever done tech prototyping where you have to take data, if you don’t mind the setup and quality of the data taken it’s garbage! And then it has to be properly interpreted.

Also overlooked is the humidity of the air temp mass. Water vapor contains much energy and has to be part of the factored data. Temp alone is not an accurate representation of climate change.

The burden of proof lies with you and those who claim that CO2 gas has a greenhouse effect because they did not present any intelligible mechanism or process that explains how CO2 gas in the atmosphere increases heat on earth.

Of course they did. They presented it well over 100 years ago. This is basic stuff everyone should have learned in middle school, high school at the latest. If someone wants to overturn our fundamental understanding of how atoms work, then the burden of proof is on them to do so. That is what this person is suggesting: that pretty much everything we know about atoms and chemistry is fundamentally wrong. You really think you have the burden of proof to prove basic chemistry?

That is the basic idea of a scientific consensus. It doesn’t mean that it is infallible. But it does mean that anyone trying to overturn the scientific consensus on an issue has the burden of proof on them to do so.

The burden of proof isn’t on biologists to prove evolution anymore, it is on its opponents to disprove it. That is because the vast majority of the relevant experts already feel the burden of proof has been met. Anyone trying to oveturn plate tectonics has the burden of proof on them. That is because the vast majority of the relevant experts already feel the burden of proof has been met. The same is true of AGW. The vast majority of relevant experts feel the burden of proof has been met, so if you want to convince them the burden of proof is on you to do so.

The parable also taking to the water droplets in clouds do not seem to be when applied to CO2 gas.

I cant understand this sentence.

We get excuses instead of answers and explanations from scientists on this crucial issue

This person clearly has not bothered to read anything besides denialists talking points. The basic science of how CO2 can increase global temperatures is the absolute first thing every introductory overview of global warming science covers. If this person had bothered to read even the first page of any explanation of global warming from anyone but denialists he or she would have an answer to the question. The claim that there are no answers to this basic question is a completely and utter lie. I could easily find a dozen links in about 10 seconds covering this, but that would get my post stuck in the moderating filter.

and that is why I and many others, concluded that global warming theory is not sensible, and it can be relegated to the pile of nonsense-science, together with the already discarded the theory of global cooling, which we were served thirty years ago.

This is probably the fourth or fifth thing any basic overview of AGW covers. Global cooling was almost entirely a media issue, even at that time most scientists were convinced that AGW was the correct, there were only a handful of very tentative papers saying that global cooling might even be possible, and they were pretty entirely rejected by other climatologists.

I would tell the person this: you aren’t going to understand AGW if you only read stuff by people who are opposed to it. You need to read the first-hand explanations written by the scientists themselves. This person obviously has not done that, and because of this doesn’t know that his or her questions have been answered countless times already.

What is the mechanism of carbon dioxide famous thermogenic effect. Tell us! Tell us! I’ll listen.

It is really quite simple. The short version is that sunlight largely passes through the atmosphere, since gasses in the atmosphere like CO2 are mostly tansparent to light in those frequencies. However, once it is absorbed, a significant fraction of the light is re-emitted at lower frequencies (mostly infra-red). At these frequencies, CO2 and some other gasses absorb much more of the light, converting the energy of the light into heat and thus increasing the temperature of the air. The more CO2, the more of the energy is converted to heat and the more the temperature increases. To claim this isn’t happening it to reject our basic understanding of how atoms work, since the absorption spectrum of CO2 (how much energy is absorbed at different frequencies) is well-established.

It is actually a bit more complicated, since as their temperature increases CO2 also emits more infra-red energy. What happens is that at a certain point it reaches a threshold where the energy emitted matches the energy absorbed, and the temperature stops increasing. The process then repeats for CO2 at higher altitudes. At a certain point the CO2 concentration drops to the point where this no longer happens. As the CO2 concentrations increase, this point moves to higher and higher altitudes, meaning the atmosphere absorbs more total energy.

Of course this is basic atomic physics, but it has been directly measured with satellites that can measure how much energy at different frequencies is escaping the Earth. There is a drop in the energy leaving the Earth at the frequencies that CO2 absorbs, sufficient to largely account for the warming we see.

And how have you in this case, pure and isolated the effect of cloud formation and sunspots effect?

I am not exactly sure what he means, but we can measure the amount of energy reaching the Earth from the sun, so that is not a major issue.

Water vapor is a feedback, it increases or decreases based on other temperature changes (so does CO2, but we can measure the isotope ratios of the CO2 so we know the vast majority of the current change is due to human-released CO2), but water vapor levels are not directly changed. So it serves to amplify existing changes rather than cause changes on its own. This is because if there is too much water vapor it just falls out as precipitation, while the processes that remove CO2 are much, much slower (working on time scales of decades rather than hours or days).

Standard denialist sort of list. A lot of letters to the editor (which often have little or no peer review), a lot of really old papers, papers in random irrelevant journals like Iron and Steel, some newsletters, lots of reviews with cursory or tortured analyses. Anything even mentining the medieval warm period or the little ice age is automatically taken as being against AGW. Politcal reviews of climategate are included in the list. But in terms of actual research, there appears to be very little if any that actually is against AGW. Nice try, though.

It does do a very good job of disproving your claim that there is a conspiracy to cover up opposing views, though.

As for your quotes, I suggest the same thing I always suggest: read something other than denialists websites. There are good explanations for these, but you won’t see them if you only read denialists sites. RealClimate has posts from the people themselves explaining the full context of those quotes and why they are presented deceptively by the denialists. It is “hide the decline” all over again, out-of-context quotes intended to make benign comments look malicious.

If you don’t read the news, your uninformed, if you just read the MSM, your misinformed.

You mean like denialists are about global cooling?

Bad or incomplete data is GIGO. Big pharma does this all the time.

As do denialists, as your list amply demonstrates. Why does this rule not apply to the emails? Denialsts are kings of cherry-picking, it is one of their defining features.

If you don’t understand the physics your going to get skunked.

Yes, that was exactly my point to the person Martin quoted.

If you ever done tech prototyping where you have to take data, if you don’t mind the setup and quality of the data taken it’s garbage! And then it has to be properly interpreted.

So says the guy who posted a link with a long list of gargbage, tortured re-interpretation of original research.

Also overlooked is the humidity of the air temp mass. Water vapor contains much energy and has to be part of the factored data. Temp alone is not an accurate representation of climate change.

Uh, yeah, obviously. Of course so do the oceans, so do numerous other things that are taken into account. But water vapor is itself a greenhouse gas, further increasing the warming. Of course you wouldn’t know that if you didn’t understand the physics.

This is all well-known and is a critical component to the analysis. You would be aware of that if you have read anything other than denialists talking points. Given your statements so far it seems that you are quite careful to avoid looking at what the scientists themselves say and instead just believe anything denialists tell you. Otherwise you would not make such clearly wrong statements.

Your instant canned reactions to any story potentially damaging to AGW are looking increasingly out of touch with reality. This is pure sock puppet journalism.

To take just one point: How do you know the emails were stolen? If you have any evidence to support this, please contact the british police who have been investigating the original release of emails, if not then stick to the facts.

Your instant canned reactions to any story potentially damaging to AGW are looking increasingly out of touch with reality. This is pure sock puppet journalism.

Interesting. Do you even understand what a sock puppet is? And, BTW, those of us with a decent grasp on the science don’t need to resort to ‘canned reactions’. We don’t cut-and-paste like the denialists do. Every explanation you see from us is in our own words. Yeah, it takes a lot of effort to debunk the screed you guys post here. But that’s the way we roll.

To take just one point: How do you know the emails were stolen? If you have any evidence to support this, please contact the british police who have been investigating the original release of emails, if not then stick to the facts.

To take just one point: How do you know the emails were stolen? If you have any evidence to support this, please contact the british police who have been investigating the original release of emails, if not then stick to the facts.

If you have any evidence it was in inside job you should be the one contacting the police, since they are currently convinced it was done by an outsider. Or do you know more about the case than they do?

I can probably guess. I’ve already tied to pre-empt a few responses (“how do we know the CO2 is from humans”, “how do we know it isn’t the sun”, “how do we know it is really happening”). However, other likely responses include something along the lines of “the climate is just too complex” (complex does not mean unpredictable), “CO2 lagged temperature changes in the past” (I already explained that CO2 can be a feedback, there was no known case in the past with a species digging massive amounts of carbon out of the ground and dumping it into the atmosphere), “CO2 can’t explain other warming periods” (we are talking about this warming period), some variation on “natural variability” (the climate does not change without something causing the change), … the list goes on and on.

”The parable talking about water droplets in clouds doesn’t seem to apply when it comes to CO2 gas.”
I don’t see exactly in what context that phrase is coming from, but I guess it makes more sense?

Sorry, not really. Maybe I just don’t know the parable being discussed.

The climate system has various feedback system that moderate changes. It’s why temps have not changed much since 1998. It’s why Venus has such high surface temps and Earth doesn’t.

The satellite data shows that where surface temps are concerned there are many variables to throw off accuracy and validity, especially since 70% of them violate their own siting requirements. It’s like getting the true outside temperature depends on where you hang the thermometer. If temp stations are so accurate why do we see a big difference of NCDC temps from GISS?

{It is presented as a ‘Surface” temperature record but it isn’t. It’s the temperature in a Stevenson Screen (Figure 3), which is set according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) between 1.25 m (4 ft 1 in) and 2 m (6 ft 7 in) above the ground. The difference is significant because temperatures in the lower few meters vary considerably as research has shows. The 0.75 m difference means that you are not comparing the same temperatures.}

You did not really read my links and are going off the same old circular assumptions. But then, sometimes you just can’t fix stupid.

Interesting. Do you even understand what a sock puppet is? And, BTW, those of us with a decent grasp on the science don’t need to resort to ‘canned reactions’. We don’t cut-and-paste like the denialists do. Every explanation you see from us is in our own words. Yeah, it takes a lot of effort to debunk the screed you guys post here. But that’s the way we roll.

Then you should send it as an email. You posted in a public comment section of a public blog, that means other people are likely to respond. In fact, doing it this way means it is much more likely that someone other than Phil is going to respond, since I doubt he is still reading a comment thread this long, nor is he likely to waste his time on comments as utterly devoid of any useful content as yours.

What has this got to do with Real Climate? I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about here.

Ah, that makes sense. You have not bothered to do even the most basic research on what transpired, yet still feel justified in criticizing others who have done the research. How typical.

The reason this is relevant is because whoever took the emails also tried to hack into realclimate and use their servers to host the emails. Also, the emails were not taken from the normal email server (which insiders would have had easier access to), but instead from a less-secure backup server. So if it was an insider, the insider decided to hack the backup server rather than leak emails they had direct access to, which is both stupid and would mean it is still a hack.

Ah, that makes sense. You have not bothered to do even the most basic research on what transpired, yet still feel justified in criticizing others who have done the research. How typical.

You obviously have more time on your hands than I do.

The reason this is relevant is because whoever took the emails also tried to hack into realclimate and use their servers to host the emails. Also, the emails were not taken from the normal email server (which insiders would have had easier access to), but instead from a less-secure backup server. So if it was an insider, the insider decided to hack the backup server rather than leak emails they had direct access to, which is both stupid and would mean it is still a hack.

How do you know that the same person who took the emails tried to hack into realclimate?

How do you know that an insider would have direct access to the emails?

Please don’t try and be clever. I don’t have any evidence either way, nor does BA. That is my whole point, which I’m sure you are aware of.

You missed my point, which is that the police, who know far more about this then you (who hasn’t done even the most basic research on the subject), are convinced that it is an outside hacking attempt. Considering those who know the most, most likely including details not released to the public, think it is an outside effort, Phil is fully justified in beliving them. If you want to argue the police are wrong, the burden of proof is on you to do so.

You aren’t arguing against Phil here, you are arguing against the police. Phil is just accepting their conclusion, while you aren’t.

No, I just feel obliged to know a little something about the subject before I start criticizing people on it.

How do you know that the same person who took the emails tried to hack into realclimate?

It was either the same person or someone closely affilited with them, since the climategate hack was attempted before the emails were posted elsewhere.

Once again, you would know this if you had bothered to read even a brief timeline of events. Not only did you not do this before criticizing Phil, you didn’t do it even after I pointed out that you don’t have any clue what you are talking about.

How do you know that an insider would have direct access to the emails?

If they didn’t, then it wasn’t really an insider, the emails were still hacked and stolen by someone who didn’t have access to them. If it is a leak, then by definition it is by someone who has access to them.

You can’t have it both ways, either the person had access to the emails, in which case they wouldn’t have bothered to attack the backup server, or it was a hacker who stole them.

Whether the hacker worked at CMU or not they broke the law by carrying out unauthorized access of a computer and illegal release of personal information. It, by definition, is stealing and hacking if the emails were taken by someone who did not have authorized access to them.

How is any of this evidence that the emails were stolen?

It is only evidence if you think through to the logical conclusions.

Of course the police can also just look at the logs from the server to see what happened to it. I find it hard to believe they hadn’t done that.

No, I just feel obliged to know a little something about the subject before I start criticizing people on it.

Ooooooh. Bitchy.

Do you know for a fact that the emails were stolen?

It was either the same person or someone closely affilited with them, since the climategate hack was attempted before the emails were posted elsewhere.

So?

Once again, you would know this if you had bothered to read even a brief timeline of events. Not only did you not do this before criticizing Phil, you didn’t do it even after I pointed out that you don’t have any clue what you are talking about.

How very dare I.

If they didn’t, then it wasn’t really an insider, the emails were still hacked and stolen by someone who didn’t have access to them. If it is a leak, then by definition it is by someone who has access to them.

You can’t have it both ways, either the person had access to the emails, in which case they wouldn’t have bothered to attack the backup server, or it was a hacker who stole them.

Whether the hacker worked at CMU or not they broke the law by carrying out unauthorized access of a computer and illegal release of personal information. It, by definition, is stealing and hacking if the emails were taken by someone who did not have authorized access to them.

If the emails were leaked from the inside then I don’t think that most people would count that as ‘stolen’. If you send someone an email while at work is that email your property? The recipient’s property? Your workplace’s property? Their workplace’s? What if it is part of your work? What if is personal but written and/or sent during working hours? What if the public are paying your wages? What if you get an FOI for their contents? And so on. It is not a simple issue.

It is only evidence if you think through to the logical conclusions.

In other words, not evidence.

Of course the police can also just look at the logs from the server to see what happened to it. I find it hard to believe they hadn’t done that.

Yes, that’s right. How awful of me to actually want to know something about a subject before forming a strong opinion.

That is ignoring your inappropriate use of gender-specific insults.

Do you know for a fact that the emails were stolen?

You were criticizing Phil for jumping to conclusions and that he should inform the police, despite the fact the he was only listening to what the police said. You can try to move the goalposts all you want, but the fact is that Phil is perfectly justified in listening to what the police say on the matter. The burden of proof is on you to prove the police wrong.

But yes, unless you think that CMU fabricated the server’s logs and the police are in on it, then I think we have established this beyond any reasonable doubt.

If the emails were leaked from the inside then I don’t think that most people would count that as ‘stolen’.

*sigh* Did you not even read your own words that I was responding to? Let me refresh your memory. The exact quote I was responding to was:

How do you know that an insider would have direct access to the emails?

Let me spell this out for you: if they don’t have direct access, then by definition they stole the emails. Accessing data on a system you are not authorized to access, even if the system is 100% unsecured, is considered stealing and is a crime. Even if they were inside CMU, then they still stole the emails.

f you send someone an email while at work is that email your property? The recipient’s property? Your workplace’s property? Their workplace’s? What if it is part of your work? What if is personal but written and/or sent during working hours? What if the public are paying your wages? What if you get an FOI for their contents? And so on. It is not a simple issue.

They hacked into a backup server. These emails were not just ones taken out of someone’s inbox, they were taken from a backup server that ordinary users should not have had access to. How many times do I have to repeat this before you actually listen?

n other words, not evidence.

Wait, what?! How would something that is evidence when you actually bother to think about it not be evidence?

Quite.

Wait, so you are admitting that someone illegally accessed a system they don’t have access to, and admit that they illegally took information from that system, but you don’t admit it was stolen? What possible definition of “stolen” could not include data illegally taken from something that someone wasn’t allowed to access?

I’m impressed that Discover could read, put into context and summarily dismiss the content of 5000 emails in 24 hours. Wow! Great speed reading!! I wonder how long it will take to get through the remaining 20,000 emails that are coming next from the climategate whistleblower. 12 hours?

”The climate system has various feedback system that moderate changes. It’s why temps have not changed much since 1998. It’s why Venus has such high surface temps and Earth doesn’t”

I thought Venus had such high temperature because it’s closer to the Sun but mainly because: ”CO2-rich atmosphere, along with thick clouds of sulfur dioxide, generates the strongest greenhouse effect in the Solar System, creating surface temperatures of over 460 °C (860 °F).[37] This makes the Venusian surface hotter than Mercury’s which has a minimum surface temperature of −220 °C and maximum surface temperature of 420 °C,[38] even though Venus is nearly twice Mercury’s distance from the Sun and thus receives only 25% of Mercury’s solar irradiance. ”

”There are no CO2 clouds above the earth, because liquid CO2 evaporates at 71 degrees F and CO2 as a gas does not break the light.
Pilots sometimes spreading liquid CO2 over the clouds to induce rain. If it could happen naturally, it would seem the warming theory.”

There are no CO2 clouds above the earth, because liquid CO2 evaporates at 71 degrees F and CO2 as a gas does not break the light.

I would say two words: absorption spectrum. As I already explained, CO2 gas is mostly transparent to visible light, but is not transparent to certain frequencies of infra-red light (which we can’t see). That means that sunlight can get into the atmosphere, but once it is absorbed by the land and re-emitted as infra-red light, it has a much harder time getting out. The more CO2, the less of the infra-red light makes it back out of the atmosphere and thus the more energy is trapped within the atmosphere.

It doesn’t have to be liquid, in fact it being liquid is completely irrelevant. I have not idea how this person got the idea that liquid CO2 has anything whatsoever to do with this.

“The more CO2, the less of the infra-red light makes it back out of the atmosphere and thus the more energy is trapped within the atmosphere.”

But as I showed you in the links, if you even bothered to go to the websites, the absorption spectrum of CO2 is a decreasing logarithmic effect where it has to double again to get the same temperature effect. It’s similar to volume output and power consumption for speaker amplifiers. They even had a chart showing it’s decreasing effect due to bandwidth saturation. If this was not so the Earth would have experienced a greenhouse runaway effect long ago. And this is not the only place I have seen this. In fact, I have an article from NASA that goes into it before it got suppressed by Hansen and Co.

The Barrett Bellamy Climate group showed that the IPCCs projections from the GCMs were way off the mark.

And they has a table of what the baseline temperature would be with gases present or lacking. The most effect was H2o.

Water is both a GHG in vapor state and moderator in transitioning to water or cloud. The large bodies of water act as either a cooling or heating radiator effect depending or local conditions. And it takes a lot of heat or melt ice when you look at the phase change caloric requirements.

As a cloud it can act as a blanket and reflector. If clouds come in late in the day they can impede the heat emissions from the warmed Earth. But eventually the heat escapes and the clouds persist they persist then the covered area will get cooler has no heat come’s in to replace what’s lost. Light clouds can act like a semi transparent window in moderating temps.

Stratospheric thunderhead clouds act like heat pipes with the warm moist air rising in the center and when it condenses the heat is released to the stratosphere at the top boundary interface.

Heated air over water has negligible effect, just try heating a bathtub of water with a hair dryer, zilch. Water absorbs the suns energy directly.

You response indicates you are either misrepresenting the science or dysfunctional in science and physics. Based on your responses I think you are distorting the science as has the IPCC and associates. You’all claim feedback which doesn’t show up in the climate data.

Also overlooked is the various components of the suns energy effect the various layers of the Atmosphere. The infrared portion of the sun effects the upper portion directly. Then there’s the ultraviolet part which heats up the O-Zone. Scientist are now looking at that part of the Sun’s spectrum as they previously lack good instrumentation to effectively analyze it.

Scientist are finding out the atmosphere is more complex then they originally thought but that is how science proceeds. As new tools are implemented by technological progress new revelations and discoveries are gained. That’s why you century old science has less relevance and has to be reinterpreted and reanalyzed due to the crude research tools they had back then. They didn’t have spectrum analyzers until sometime in the 50’s if I remember right.

But as I showed you in the links, if you even bothered to go to the websites, the absorption spectrum of CO2 is a decreasing logarithmic effect where it has to double again to get the same temperature effect.

You didn’t read my whole explanation. Re-read the part about the altitude issue. The logarithmic decrease is only an issue if you pretend the atmosphere is infinitely thin. But of course it isn’t, so even if the CO2 at one altitude has reduced absorption due to already absorbing some radiation, CO2 at higher altitudes can still absorb it. Increasing CO2 concentrations means more energy is absorbed at higher altitudes where the logarithmic decrease is much smaller.

Once again, you need to understand the basics of the science, which you obviously have not bothered to do. You didn’t even bother to read my whole explanation before commenting.

And they has a table of what the baseline temperature would be with gases present or lacking. The most effect was H2o.

I already explained that water can act as a feedback. You conveniently ignored this.

And it takes a lot of heat or melt ice when you look at the phase change caloric requirements.

But ice reflects a lot more energy than liquid water does, so when the ice melts it increases temperatures further. Once again, it is a feedback. Melting ice will absorb some energy of course, but that will only delay the warming a little, it won’t prevent it and it won’t lessen it. The warming will stop when and only when the amount of energy coming in matches the amount of energy going out.

This is basic, basic stuff you would get just from spending 5 minutes reading non-denialists sources. You simply have no clue about even the most basic aspects of the subject.

As a cloud it can act as a blanket and reflector. If clouds come in late in the day they can impede the heat emissions from the warmed Earth. But eventually the heat escapes and the clouds persist they persist then the covered area will get cooler has no heat come’s in to replace what’s lost. Light clouds can act like a semi transparent window in moderating temps.

Is this supposed to be a surprise? Once again, this is the absolute most basic stuff. The fact that you think this is even remotely original or surprising just shows again that you have not bothered to look at all at what non-denialists are saying.

Heated air over water has negligible effect, just try heating a bathtub of water with a hair dryer, zilch. Water absorbs the suns energy directly

I see, no wonder this is hard for you, you don’t even understand basic thermodynamics.

Water has higher heat capacity than air, but the energy does not just disappear, the energy will cause the water heat up (just more slowly than the air). If the water is warmer than the air, energy will flow from the water to the air, heating the air. If the air is warmer than the water, the opposite will occur. Energy will flow in such a way to make the temperature in two bodies equal.

As I already explained, this will only slow things down temporarily, in the end the temperature of the air will still rise and the result will be the same. It is the energy in the air that ultimately determines when the temperature increase will end, not the energy in the water.

That is why scientists are trying hard to figure out how much energy is being absorbed by the water, and it looks like the water is absorbing less and less energy as time goes on. So although the water has reducing masking the effects of AGW up until now, with that effect decreasing the temperature increase will accelerate.

The water also absorbs CO2, but the amount of CO2 it can hold decreases as the water temperature increases. This means that as the water warms up, it will dump more CO2 into the air, further increasing the greenhouse effect.

You response indicates you are either misrepresenting the science or dysfunctional in science and physics.

No, you simply don’t understand the basics of the science, and are just parroting denialists talking points you don’t begin to understand.

Also overlooked is the various components of the suns energy effect the various layers of the Atmosphere.

The only one overlooking that effect is you, as I already pointed out. The sun’s output, if it has been changing at all, has been decreasing over the warming period, and it has been especially low over the last decade or so (lower than any other time on record).

Scientist are finding out the atmosphere is more complex then they originally thought but that is how science proceeds.

Once again, the one over-simplifying the atmosphere is you and whoever you got your ideas from. The more we learn about the atmosphere, the more clear and large the warming appears. Our increase in knowledge is not helping your case, it is hurting it.

Total bull, typical of AGW religious believers. The list is recent enough since the IPCC 4th AR and by credible scientists and experts from various fields.

{Anything even mentioning the medieval warm period or the little ice age is automatically taken as being against AGW. }

Well that is what the CRU emails are trying to hide, what do you think the hockystick was really about?

{RealClimate has posts from the people themselves explaining the full context of those quotes and why they are presented deceptively by the denialists.}

As I said before, Real climate is run by a NASA GCM programmer as a shill for GISS. And they are biased. Try CO2science.

See:
Climatologist slams RealClimate.org for ‘erroneously communicating the reality of the how climate system is actually behaving’ – Rebuts Myths On Sea Level, Oceans and Arctic Ice

{Denialsts are kings of cherry-picking, it is one of their defining features.}

That is what the IPCC and official consensus science organizations do, they put out a request for papers and except only what supports their joke of a peer review process. Many former scientist have come forward to expose the connivance’s of these schemers who try and justify their existence off of taxpayer funds and scaremonger grants. If they present the truth then people would go- hohum, another science project, give them some crumbs. Politicians couldn’t pass carbon capping legislation and would therefore concede more power to the people. Oh the horror!

{The logarithmic decrease is only an issue if you pretend the atmosphere is infinitely thin. But of course it isn’t, so even if the CO2 at one altitude has reduced absorption due to already absorbing some radiation, CO2 at higher altitudes can still absorb it. Increasing CO2 concentrations means more energy is absorbed at higher altitudes where the logarithmic decrease is much smaller.}

That’s an assumption, where’s the scientific paper that supports that? Besides, CO2 is the heaviest substance in the air so it would have a tenancy to collect in the lower portion of the atmosphere. It’s why water vapor is more buoyant. Your stuck on 100 year old science. LOL

{I already explained that water can act as a feedback.}

And as I have explained the degree and type of feedback is what is in contention. You AGWers claim that the increased forcing effect of CO2 will evaporate more water which will further accelerate surface heating as a GHG feedback. But satellite research shows that the water vapor has decreased this past decade. Therefor this assumption must be bogus. So water must be more of a moderator to prevent runaway. There’s no water on Venus.

{But ice reflects a lot more energy than liquid water does, so when the ice melts it increases temperatures further. Once again, it is a feedback.}

I was alluding to the fact that ice in the Antarctic is increasing over land. The ice lost on the Wester self occurs periodically and is most due to warm water upwelling near the Western peninsula and the ring of fire runs around there, aka underwater volcanic activity. This fear of the ice melting in areas of Antarctica and Greenland is largely exaggerated and misreported. AGWers do it continuously.

{Water has higher heat capacity than air, but the energy does not just disappear, the energy will cause the water heat up (just more slowly than the air). If the water is warmer than the air, energy will flow from the water to the air, heating the air. If the air is warmer than the water, the opposite will occur. Energy will flow in such a way to make the temperature in two bodies equal.}

Duh! But what you don’t concede to is it in no way can account for the warming of the oceans because of the rate of warming is negligible. You’d be there all year trying to heat it up. It’s more the ocean accounting for the warming of the air. It’s what melts the ice in the arctic if you understand decadeal ocean currents. But you’ll hype out of that too.

Sunday, September 11, 2011
Global Ocean Heat Content Is Still Flat

By Anthony Watts

2nd Quarter 2011 NODC Global OHC Anomalies

by Bob Tisdale

While there was a significant increase in Global Ocean Heat Content over the term of the data, Global Ocean Heat Content has flattened in recent years.

And look at the IPCCs projection on that, clearly they overemphasized the feedback from CO2, only the sun could heat the oceans like that.

{The water also absorbs CO2, but the amount of CO2 it can hold decreases as the water temperature increases. This means that as the water warms up, it will dump more CO2 into the air, further increasing the greenhouse effect.}

You forget that the ocean sequesters CO2 through calcium carbonate which ends up on the ocean floor. One researcher projected that after a couple of million years most of the CO2 would be sequestered and the water vapor would decrease leaving a cold ice ball. So fossil burning is a good thing. And another researcher showed water vapor had decreased over the past decade opposite what the IPCC claimed.

{Once again, the one over-simplifying the atmosphere is you and whoever you got your ideas from.}

The first, “The persistence of solar activity indicators and the descent of the Sun into Maunder Minimum conditions,” takes a close look at the just ended long, deep, and extended solar minimum in order to compare it to the beginning of the Maunder Minimum of the 1600s, when there were no significant sunspots for 6-plus decades, to see if this can give us clues on whether the sun is about to enter another such Grand Minimum.

Recent results from CERN provide strong evidence that the sun did influence this cooling, and might very well produce cooling again if the sun dips into another Grand Minimum.

The second paper, “Observed and modeled record ozone decline over the Arctic during winter/spring 2011″, takes a look at the unprecedented large ozone hole over the Arctic during the cold 2011 winter, when the temperatures in the stratosphere over the North Pole were colder than in recent years.

The interannual variability of column ozone over the northern polar region is, as expected, highly correlated with the corresponding year-to-year variability of the seasonally-averaged temperatures in the lower stratosphere.

In other words, the ozone hole over the Arctic is due to annual temperature changes. Colder weather will increase the size of the ozone hole.

It’s interesting to see two people with (seemingly to me at least) quite a bit of insight in the subject.

Don’t be fooled by Scottar’s supposed ‘insight’. It’s all pseudo-science cobbled together from fake “skeptic” sites like wattsupwiththat (WUWT). You can be quite certain that anyone citing WUWT as a source is only recycling denialist talking points. And that “900+ Peer-Reviewed Papers Supporting Skepticism of “Man-Made” Global Warming (AGW) Alarm” list has been debunked so many times before it’s getting beyond tiresome.

We have, in fact, been experiencing abnormal cooling for the past few years due to one of the most extended solar minimums in a long time. That’s why the fact that 2010 was the hottest year in recorded history is all the more amazing. Rest assured that mankind’s continued use of fossil fuels will prevent us from sliding into the next ice age no matter what the sun does. Unfortunately, that’s about the only positive side effect of AGW. The other consequences of at least 2 deg C of warming will all be negative, some devastatingly so, like severe drought, more severe storms, and rising sea levels.

I would recommend Spencer Weart’s “The Discovery of Global Warming – A History” page (to get a grounding in the science) and/or the greenman3610 channel on YouTube, especially the stuff tagged as “Climate Denial Crock of the Week” (if you want to see the denier lies and disinformation debunked one by one in an entertaining video series).

Blackcat claims that the extra anthropogenic CO2 rise is the main cause global warming. That this addition is driving and accelerating the climate change to dangerously projected future heat levels that are forecast by climate models. But Kevin Trenberth, like many of his IPCC AGW comrades recently admitted that there exists many shortcomings and failures with the climate models’ inadequacies in regards to precipitation. Such as:

“all models contain large errors in precipitation simulations, both in terms of mean fields and their annual cycle, as well as their characteristics: the intensity, frequency, and duration of precipitation”

{The logarithmic decrease is only an issue if you pretend the atmosphere is infinitely thin. But of course it isn’t, so even if the CO2 at one altitude has reduced absorption due to already absorbing some radiation, CO2 at higher altitudes can still absorb it. Increasing CO2 concentrations means more energy is absorbed at higher altitudes where the logarithmic decrease is much smaller.}

Really, CO2 is only about .04% of the atmosphere and even less at higher altitudes. So would that extra 7% increase over the past decade show up at higher altitudes? And as I pointed out CO2 is the heaviest component of the Atmosphere. Water vapor is the lightest which is why clouds form.

Blackcat claims:

{Water has higher heat capacity than air, but the energy does not just disappear, the energy will cause the water heat up (just more slowly than the air). If the water is warmer than the air, energy will flow from the water to the air, heating the air. If the air is warmer than the water, the opposite will occur. Energy will flow in such a way to make the temperature in two bodies equal. As I already explained, this will only slow things down temporarily, in the end the temperature of the air will still rise and the result will be the same. It is the energy in the air that ultimately determines when the temperature increase will end, not the energy in the water.}

Lets look at what’s really going on past his fluff physics.

There is a significant difference between land and water. Downwelling longwave has little effect over the ocean. The primary means of heating and cooling over land is radiative, absorption of shortwave by day and emission of longwave day and night.

The ocean is different. First of all ocean absorbs nearly 100% of shortwave that hits it and it is absorbed to a depth of 50-100 meters (the mixed layer). Land absorbs about 20% less shortwave because it is higher albedo and it only heats it down to a few centimeters in a single day. Land gives up this heat very quickly at night. There is very little diurnal temperature variation over the ocean because the shortwave radiation is absorbed to great depth and can’t readily escape radiatively because water is essentially a brick wall to longwave infrared.

The ocean cools primarily (70%) through evaporation. Because downwelling longwave cannot penetrate water beyond a depth of a few micrometers the primary effect of downwelling longwave radiation from low clouds or CO2 is increased evaporation rate.

Clouds and GHGs don’t insulate deep bodies of water like they insulate land surfaces. This is Trenberth’s Travesty (the missing heat). He expected to find it in the ocean but it just isn’t there. It’s being rejected by the skin layer of the ocean in latent heat of vaporization and it remains insensible until it rises far enough for adiabatic lapse rate to cool it below the dewpoint.

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.

So Blackcats claim that clouds are mostly positive in feedback is largely pretentious.

Then there is this new peer reviewed paper:

Clouds Have Large Negative Cooling Effect on Earth’s Radiation Budget
Posted on September 20, 2011 by Anthony Watts

This new paper by Richard P. Allan of the University of Reading discovers via a combination of satellite observations and models that the cooling effect of clouds far outweighs the long-wave or “greenhouse” warming effect. While Dessler and Trenberth (among others) claim clouds have an overall positive feedback warming effect upon climate due to the long-wave back-radiation, this new paper shows that clouds have a large net cooling effect by blocking incoming solar radiation and increasing radiative cooling outside the tropics. This is key, because since clouds offer a negative feedback as shown by this paper and Spencer and Braswell plus Lindzen and Choi, it throws a huge monkey wrench in climate model machinery that predict catastrophic levels of positive feedback enhanced global warming due to increased CO2.

So clouds are largely negative in their feedback. And where do clouds come from, why water vapor of course. But what causes clouds formation and condensation?

Dr Henrik Svensmark of the Danish National Space Centre in Copenhagen has pioneered the study of the effects of cosmic rays on cloud formation. Tthe latest research from the CERN cloud seeding experiment that confirms the Svensmark claim that cosmic particles form condensation nuclei (CN) in the lower atmosphere. This creates the low clouds that controls the amount of cloud cover and thereby the global temperature; like a screen in a greenhouse. The IPCC consistently ignore the relationship between sunspot and global temperature. CERN is the organization that invented the World Wide Web, that built the multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider, and that has now built a pristinely clean stainless steel chamber that precisely recreated the Earth’s atmosphere.

In this chamber, 63 CERN scientists from 17 European and American institutes have done what global warming doomsayers said could never be done, demonstrate that cosmic rays promote the formation of molecules that in Earth’s atmosphere can grow and seed clouds, the cloudier and thus cooler it will be. Because the sun’s magnetic field controls how many cosmic rays reach Earth’s atmosphere (the stronger the suns magnetic field, the more it shields Earth from incoming cosmic rays from space), the sun determines the temperature on Earth.

The IPCC proponents claimed there was no evidence that cosmic radiation was creating as condensation nuclei in the atmosphere. The problem was given to a supposedly neutral agency. However, an important part of the discovery is missed, partly because of lack of focus on water vapor and precipitation, but mostly because the IPCC control of climate science blocked knowledge and advances for 30 years. A major problem in early meteorology and weather and climate research was there were more clouds than nuclei.

Evaporation occurs when water molecules use energy from the Sun to escape from a surface. This is a phase change, as water in liquid form becomes a gas, water vapor. The energy is not lost but becomes latent heat in the water vapor. If the air temperature is cooled below the Dew Point Temperature then a reverse phase change occurs called condensation and water vapor becomes liquid. The latent heat is released, which is why temperatures usually rise when precipitation occurs. The problem is this process requires a critical component, a solid surface. In the atmosphere this is provided by the CN. Water vapor condenses on to them to form water droplets, which are microscopic. They’re visible as clouds and remain suspended because they are so small – it’s estimated 1 million must combine to form a moderate sized raindrop.

The majority of CN were salt particles, kaolinite, the smallest clay particles and other particulates. Now the CT provides the missing nuclei. The amount of cosmic radiation is reduced as it passes through the Sun’s magnetic field and then the Earth’s magnetic field and then the upper atmosphere. In the atmosphere the cosmic rays become muons or heavy electrons that penetrate to sea level. They are the missing CN.

Proof that cosmic rays provide CN to form clouds in the lower atmosphere is an ugly fact that even the professional scientific spin-doctors cannot avoid. These clouds vary with the intensity of cosmic rays reaching the atmosphere and act like a shade in the global greenhouse to control temperature. We now have proof of the mechanism or cause and effect for what was previously only a correlation. Sunspots are not the cause but a manifestation of changes in the Sun’s magnetic field that in turn modulates the intensity of cosmic rays reaching the Earth. So another ugly fact creates a large cloud that destroys the politically driven AGW hypothesis.

Another fact of the bogusness of AGW is that Cumulonimbus clouds act as irises for heat release. Any pilot will tell you there are strong updrafts under big cumulus clouds. The updraft very likely continues to the top of the cloud where the upward velocity drops to zero, cooling occurs, and the velocity of the droplets subsequently becomes negative. If the droplets get big enough, you get rain falling out of the center.

Cumulonimbus clouds can have a shape like a stovepipe top hat with rain falling from the center and hot moist air flowing up the walls of the stovepipe. The idea is some clouds can act more like a heat conveyor, and other clouds can act more like a blanket. It is important to distinguish between the two and accurately handle the heat flow. I think that was an important point this paper was making, if not explicitly. Using optical density alone will be insufficient for some cloud types.

So the AGW religious fanatics are under a big could of credibility in their claims, much like the Catholic Inquisition tried to claim domain over science and enlightenment. Don’t dare go aginst his holiness the Pope!

And Metzler, I said that fossil burning is a good thing because in several million years, without the injection of additional CO2, the oceans would sequester the CO2 out of the Atmosphere via chemical reaction with calcium, of which the oceans are well buffered with, which would affect the mean temperature. I also read if Humans could burn all the fossil fuel possible in an instant it still would not be enough to double the CO2 in the atmosphere.

Blackcat claims that the extra anthropogenic CO2 rise is the main cause global warming. That this addition is driving and accelerating the climate change to dangerously projected future heat levels that are forecast by climate models. But Kevin Trenberth, like many of his IPCC AGW comrades recently admitted that there exists many shortcomings and failures with the climate models’ inadequacies in regards to precipitation.

You have to admire the tenacity of your average AGW denier. Here we are on… what, the 5th page of the Bad Astronomer’s site, with no apparent let-up on this thread. Why? Only because it’s a thread on AGW, which apparently is a like a dog whistle to any loon with a conspiracy theory. But for the moment, OK, I’ll try to play your silly little game (of which, by definition, there can be no winners. Because a conspiracy theorist can never be proved wrong, right? :-))

So rather than try to debunk the whole ‘too long, didn’t read’ cut-and-paste screed you just posted there, which, admirably, TheBlackCat has done on several previous occasions… let’s just see how we get on with your very first point which I just block-quoted.

For starters: what does observing that the global average temperature has risen by about 1 deg C since the 1950’s, a rate unprecedented for *millions* of years, have anything to do with *models*? And… the fact that no known factor in the *natural* variability of the Earth’s eco-system can account for that unprecedented warming.

TBC, there’s no need to go any farther than these gems to prove how poor Scott’s grasp of physics is:

Really, CO2 is only about .04% of the atmosphere and even less at higher altitudes. So would that extra 7% increase over the past decade show up at higher altitudes? And as I pointed out CO2 is the heaviest component of the Atmosphere. Water vapor is the lightest which is why clouds form.”

1. Gases in the atmosphere aren’t sorted by molecular weight, and it’s a good thing they aren’t since CO2 is heavier than oxygen. You would find it very difficult to breathe, especially at sea level, if they were.

Furthermore, the “light” molecular weight of water vapor has virtually nothing to do with the formation of clouds. Nitrogen, Oxygen, and Argon, the 3 biggest components of the atmosphere are all much lighter than water vapor, yet none of them form clouds.

2) In terms of a percentage of the total atmosphere, CO2 actually increases with altitude because water vapor condenses out (the readings above don’t reflect this because they’re reported in terms of a dry atmosphere- meaning the water vapor has already been removed). By the time you reach the stratosphere there’s essentially no water vapor, but still plenty of CO2 because it’s unaffected by the adiabatic lapse rate.

I was alluding to the fact that ice in the Antarctic is increasing over land. The ice lost on the Wester self occurs periodically and is most due to warm water upwelling near the Western peninsula and the ring of fire runs around there, aka underwater volcanic activity.

A volcanic eruption the size of Mount St. Helens releases about 10^17 J. The heat of fusion for ice (the energy required to melt it) is about 334 J/g. Care to do the math to show us how plausible it is that underwater volcanoes are heating the water enough to cause significant melting of the WAIS?

I’ll save you the effort and tell you that an eruption the size of Mount St. Helens only has enough energy to melt about 1/3 of a km^3 of ice. The WAIS has been losing at least 42 km^3 per year for the past decade (see Shepard, Wingham, and Rignot 2004). That means a minimum of 140 Mount St. Helens sized eruptions every year for a solid decade- all undetected by seismologists- to explain the ice loss. That’s even assuming 100% efficiency of transferring volcanic energy into melting ice rather than creating noise, pulverizing rock, warming the water which will be dispersed by currents or radiate its heat to the atmosphere, etc.

If temp stations are so accurate why do we see a big difference of NCDC temps from GISS?

We don’t. The data aren’t reported as absolute temperatures, but as anomalies from an arbitrary baseline. The two datasets use different baselines. If you use a common baseline, they’re virtually identical. The minor differences come from how areas are weighted and how areas with sparse coverage are treated (are they ignored or assumed to be similar to neighboring areas).

It’s analogous to measuring your height as 6 feet from the floor or 16 feet from sea level. The two measurements are very different if you compare them on their own baselines, but if the floor is 10 feet above sea level, the two measurements are identical when compared on a common baseline.

Clouds and GHGs don’t insulate deep bodies of water like they insulate land surfaces. This is Trenberth’s Travesty (the missing heat). He expected to find it in the ocean but it just isn’t there.

His travesty isn’t that the heat is missing because it isn’t in the ocean. His travesty is that its missing because we have no way of measuring if it’s in the ocean or not.

The 2010 claim is only by 0.1F where temperature measuring stations can vary by 0.5 of a degree in accuracy. Even that 1.0 warming is being contested by scientist like Roy Spenser who say it’s more like 0.7C when you remove all the cooked data that GISS and the IPCC provides. This issue is covered expertly at surfacestations.org and here:

This is also why temps based on world wide stations show warming while NCDC does not for over the last decade. Arctic temps don’t reflect this.

{You’ll notice in this graph of atmospheric CO2 readings that the values at sea level (LJO) are no higher than at 9,000 ft (SPO) or 11,000 ft (MLO).}

The Troposphere is approx 65 km over the tropic latitudes while it’s approx 20 km over the polar latitudes. Yet for all the increase in fossil fuel burning the rate remains essentially constant, where do you suppose all the CO2 is coming from? And the PPM chart shows no significant increase in step with fossil fuel burning.

{Furthermore, the “light” molecular weight of water vapor has virtually nothing to do with the formation of clouds. Nitrogen, Oxygen, and Argon, the 3 biggest components of the atmosphere are all much lighter than water vapor, yet none of them form clouds.}

Lets see Metzler:

H2O 16+1+1=18

N2 14+14=28

O2 16+16=32

Ar 40

Trying to reinvent physics and chemistry here Metzler? Also the temperature decreases to zip with the pressure, most of the thermal action is at the surface. And a final note with water. The specific heat of water is 1 calorie/gram °C = 4.186 joule/gram °C which is higher than any other common substance. As a result, water plays a very important role in temperature regulation.

{A volcanic eruption the size of Mount St. Helens releases about 10^17 J. The heat of fusion for ice (the energy required to melt it) is about 334 J/g. }

The most recent eruptive activity occurred at Lassen Peak in 1914-1917 A.D..

“Disruption of the sticky lava on the upper east side of Lassen Peak on May 19 resulted in an avalanche of hot rock onto a snowfield. A lahar was generated that reached more than 18 kilometers down Lost Creek. On May 22, an explosive eruption produced a pyroclastic flow that devastated an area as far as 6 kilometers northeast of the summit.”

Speaking at the International Symposium on Antarctic Earth Sciences in Edinburgh Dr Phil Leat from British Antarctic Survey said, “There is so much that we don’t understand about volcanic activity beneath the sea — it’s likely that volcanoes are erupting or collapsing all the time.

Although ice buried the unnamed volcano, molten rock is still churning below. David Vaughan, a glaciologist with the BAS and a co-author of the new study, said the discovery might explain the speeding up of historically slow-moving glaciers in the region.

Researchers also think that magma-heated rock beneath Greenland’s massive ice sheet is accelerating its melting, but whether a volcano or just a pool of magma is responsible is still a matter of debate.

“On Monday, scientists from the Norwegian Polar Institute reported that they’d measured sea temperatures beneath an East Antarctic ice shelf and found no signs of warming whatsoever. ”

It’s sea ice and not mainland ice, it’s not even 1% of the total mass. And as Goddard shows the mainland ice has been increasing. And this has happened it the past with decadeal ocean circulation cycles, nothing new here. And notice where the volcanoes are and most of the heating.

{We don’t. The data aren’t reported as absolute temperatures, but as anomalies from an arbitrary baseline. The two datasets use different baselines.}

Svensmark’s Cosmic Theory Confirmed; Explains More Than Solar Role in Climate Change

The majority of CN were salt particles, kaolinite, the smallest clay particles and other particulates. Now the CT provides the missing nuclei. The amount of cosmic radiation is reduced as it passes through the Sun’s magnetic field and then the Earth’s magnetic field and then the upper atmosphere. In the atmosphere the cosmic rays become muons or heavy electrons that penetrate to sea level. They are the missing CN.

Geez Scottar, give it up. No one here on a science blog is interested in your denialist tripe. WattsUpWithThat, The Register, The Financial Post?! These sites are all about *politics*, nothing to do with science. And Lawrence Solomon is one of the biggest AGW denier journalists out there.

All you are doing is echoing AGW denier talking points and pseudo-science. Please, do yourself a favour and try reading up on the real science behind AGW. Spencer Weart’s “The Discovery of Global Warming – A History” would be a great place to start (follow the link there at A GOOD PLACE TO START).

WattsUpWithThat, icecap.us, drtimball.com, livescience, co2science.org, ect; these are science sites, just like Discover is a science site. You are trying to deflect the relevance of the sources and content, a typical AGWer tacit of diversion. Do you know Sorros of moveon.org?

If the Register had an article that referenced an article of Discover that claimed Al gore was right you’d be jumping up and down saying- see, see, I told you so. so you are being silly with that claim of political media. I could claim realclimate.org was political just as easily as Dr. Roger Pielke claimed it exaggerating the warming trend although the link was to whatsupwiththat.com website. But that’s political to you.

And how many periodicals deal with science issues from credible organizations and other? You are just trying to demonize science articles and reports that don’t support your beliefs, they are also echoed on other science periodicals. They have just as many pro AGW articles on news sites like the Register-UK, maybe more. And to be fair, Phil probably does have some good articles on subjects of Astronomy but I take him like the Science Guy.

But guys like Al Gore, Hansen, they are not political, they are scientists, –right! Where science and money is involved, politics tends to follow. Politicians typically want more power, how else could they justify automatic raises where Social Security recipients have not seen in 3 years? Oh it because they have very important, life changing positions for the “welfare of the people and children.” Some scientists have the same basic premise on their pedestals of eliteness. Connelly is a good example, remember, he got expelled from Wikipedia for his pseudo, cherry-picking science.

I just handed you your head on several gaffs you made on science facts but all I get is the typical AGWer cheap whine. It’s all just cut and paste denier comments no matter the source.

And here’s the gist of the most reveling review of Weart book on Amazon

Fascinating but scientifically disappointing, October 12, 2005
By
James D. Bushnell “Chemical Engineer”
This review is from: The Discovery of Global Warming

“I found this book to be very well written and interesting. I am glad to have read it, for I now understand much better the evolution of the current reasoning on the subject of global warming. The book does not reveal these important facts (data) , and I wonder if it is not because the basis is so flimsy that the proponents do not want it to be known. ”

It appeals to emotionalism which most artsy fartsies and enviros knee- jerk off on. It leads to expensive measures and regulations like carbon taxes and expensive, unsustainable renewable energy for although the fuel is free the equipment needed to capture it is not and it’s not 24/7.

All these proposed government regulations will endup making energy essentially unfordable for the masses all based on bogus claims. It ends up in the UN proposing world wide carbon taxes and control. That’s why I respond to flatbrainers like you, if not to convince you, then others the madness of AGW claims that are being overhyped by many as it’s a hot news item.

It’s about people using the fears and ignorance of the basic scientific lowbrow to scam money. But with the web one can research and find put what really going on. It’s like do I trust government with either party? The more I read and research the less I trust the established party hierarchy. I am strongly considering the Libertarian party for that reason. Cronyism has sunk too deep in all facets of government and the scientific, financial, defense and industrial sectors.

Life is too short to bother attempting to debunk that wall of anti-science noise you just threw up there, Scottar. If you only read sites (and Amazon book reviews) that tickle your anti-AGW confirmation bias, then you are doomed to be forever misinformed on this issue. So be it. I care – in so much as I don’t like the fact that some readers might fall for your nonsense – but I don’t care enough to keep responding to the tl;dr posts of an AGW conspiracy theorist.

251: Scottar, I disagree with so much of what you said that it’s hard to know where to start.

But you should note that I have been deleting your past few comments because they have been invective and insulting. That violates the one single rule I have here: don’t be a jerk. If you cannot comment without violating that rule, then please take your ideas somewhere else.

And it’s not just the AGW climate gate stuff. This is what’s happening all across the political spectrum. It’s called cronyism.

I go out beyond the mainstream to do a factcheck. Contrived science is rotten science, just like contrived legislation got us to where we are today. That’s why I’m basically independent with Libertarian leanings.

Yah, and the black booted, AGWer thought police have invaded a persons private property, all in the name of PCism.

“The burden of proof lies with you and those who claim that CO2 gas has a greenhouse effect because they did not present any intelligible mechanism or process that explains how CO2 gas in the atmosphere increases heat on earth. ”
Well well well, the old Lonny Eachus Fallacy wheeled out again. When will these deniers go and research their science before posting this kind of argument?

“I think Phil Plait is half full of baloney if he can’t see the sun climate relationship and exaggerates the CO2 forcing effect. Especially when he calims (sic) climategate Is manufactured.”

So Phil is half full of baloney. That makes you completely full of it then, because if you really had a knock out full on megadestructive argument, that 100% battered AGW into submission you would have written it up into a scientific paper, gotten it peer reviewed and published and would now be basking in the warmth and limelight of a Nobel prize and much media interest. Instead you’re posting tired old denialist cut and paste arguments that have been posted many many many times before on this site.

Write a Peer review paper? Typical defensive crap from you fantasy land green necks. The problem is the peer review process has been hijacked by bureaucratic ‘Goldman Sacks wannabes’ who are after the money, not real science.

Notice how before the industrial ramp-up of emissions of 1940 the warming was just as steep and presently it has flattened out, even thought CO2 has risen over 18% over the past decade? We where suppose to be lucky to see snow again LOL!

“In the APS it is ok to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible? The claim (how can you measure the average temperature of the whole earth for a whole year?) is that the temperature has changed from ~288.0 to ~288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years, which (if true) means to me is that the temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this ‘warming’ period.”

In the Wall Street Journal, a group of sixteen prominent scientists, including physicists, meteorologists and climatologists, come forward to express solidarity with Giaever, writing that:

“…large numbers of scientists, many very prominent, share the opinions of Dr. Giaever. And the number of scientific “heretics” is growing with each passing year. The reason is a collection of stubborn scientific facts.

Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 “Climategate” email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.” But the warming is only missing if one believes computer models where so-called feedbacks involving water vapor and clouds greatly amplify the small effect of CO2.

So why do so many still cling to the hope of climate change catastrophe? The scientists offer their own view, again in the Journal:

“Alarmism over climate is of great benefit to many, providing government funding for academic research and a reason for government bureaucracies to grow. Alarmism also offers an excuse for governments to raise taxes, taxpayer-funded subsidies for businesses that understand how to work the political system, and a lure for big donations to charitable foundations promising to save the planet.”

And that is what you AGWers fail to admit along with green renewable energy advocates. More seminary science and ad hominem then objective science. But those legislative clowns both in state and federal positions have made sure the pseudo science will persist as the science, industrial complex that Eisenhower warned against has become entrenched in so many factions of government. Too many, such as you, are drinking the koolaide.

scottar (258): Are you accusing me of censorship? Care to prove that? You might want to familiarize yourself with how spam filters work first, though, especially ones set to automod anything with lots of links.

And your “facts’ are completely wrong. The claim that the Earth hasn’t warmed in 10 years is complete and utter garbage; I have posted on this several times. The people making that claim are cherry picking the data to make it look like warming hasn’t occurred, without looking at real trends. In fact, most claims like that from the denialist side are grossly misinterpreting data.

The WSJ OpEd you quote is so bad, so awful, so wrong, it’s hard to believe someone could write it with a straight face. Plenty of other sites debunk it, so I haven’t bothered, but that “16 scientist” claim is also really disingenuous: only a couple are climate scientists, and the WSJ turned down an OpEd by 255climate scientists stating global warming is real and human-caused. Now why would that be? If you guessed that the WSJ is hugely biased against reality, then you win.

I don’t know where you stand in it but it’s a factor, especially with the IPCC.

The scientists’ final draft of the 1995 Report said plainly, on 5 separate occasions, that no evidence of an anthropogenic influence on global climate was detectable, and that it was not known when such an influence would become evident.

However, a single scientist, Dr. Ben Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, rewrote the draft at the IPCC’s request, deleting all 5 statements, replacing them with a single statement to the effect that a human influence on global climate was now discernible, and making some 200 consequential amendments.

These changes were considered by a political contact group, but they were not referred back to the vast majority of the authors whose texts Dr. Santer had tampered with, and whose 5-times-stated principal conclusion he had single-handedly and unjustifiably negated.

This is a constant theme with the consensus science groups board members. They don’t want scientists, they want ‘yes’ researchers.

“The claim that the Earth hasn’t warmed in 10 years is complete and utter garbage”

What warming has happened has not showed up as a result of CO2 forcing, the alleged forcing is way out of line of actual increases, which show no acceleration over the last 2 centuries. Besides, the temperature data is heavily biased when you look at GISS graphs.

I could go on with example after example but the reality is: You can shove the truth to the back of the closet, but sooner or later someones going to come along to clean out the closet and discover it.

Your denials are just awful Phil, ad hoministic, as is most of the rest of the AGW crowd, there’s money and power behind it.

251: Scottar, I disagree with so much of what you said that it’s hard to know where to start.

But you should note that I have been deleting your past few comments because they have been invective and insulting. That violates the one single rule I have here: don’t be a jerk. If you cannot comment without violating that rule, then please take your ideas somewhere else.

I guess that answers the question. Short memory you have!

Phil:
“The claim that the Earth hasn’t warmed in 10 years is complete and utter garbage; I have posted on this several times. The people making that claim are cherry picking the data to make it look like warming hasn’t occurred, without looking at real trends. In fact, most claims like that from the denialist side are grossly misinterpreting data. ”

E-mail messages obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that NASA concluded that its own climate findings were inferior to those maintained by both the University of East Anglia’s Climatie Research Unit (CRU)—the scandalized source of the leaked Climate-gate e-mails—and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center.

The e-mails from 2007 reveal that when a USA Today reporter asked if NASA’s data “was more accurate” than other climate-change data sets, NASA’s Dr. Reto A. Ruedy replied with an unequivocal no. He said “the National Climatic Data Center’s procedure of only using the best stations is more accurate,” admitting that some of his own procedures led to less accurate readings. “My recommendation to you is to continue using NCDC’s data for the U.S. means and [East Anglia] data for the global means,” Ruedy told the reporter.

Hansen seems to have a teflon coat. Despite all his failures (including predictions of the West Side Highway being underwater by 2010 made in 1980 – sea level rises are about 1 inch) and data issues, he escapes scrutiny.

Just to put some numbers to this global manipulation, here is a selection from Iceland the change since last year’sversion. Enhancing warming trend by cooling off the past.
Reykjavik (degrees C)

They accomplished this ‘kockey sticking’ by cooling off old data and warming later data, in part through elimination of a UHI adjustment in the US. They also cooled ocean temperatures near the bothersome warm blip around 1940, The climategate emails included one by Wigley of UEA and later NCAR suggesting a cooling then of about 0.15C would be effective but still plausible.

This is like Obama trying to paint a rosy color on the economic picture by distorting the facts.

The fact is surface temps are not very good indicators of climate trend till you get solid good reliable records for a century or more. But since many stations here in the US and more so world wide have been sited for insite violations and intermittancy the best records remain some rural stations, balloon radio sonar and satellites, despite minor drift errors.

Bicentennial Decrease of the Total Solar Irradiance Leads to Unbalanced Thermal Budget of the Earth

Habibullo I. Abdussamatov, Pulkovo Observatory of the RAS

Applied Physics Research Vol. 4, No. 1; February 2012

From the early 1990s we observe bicentennial decrease in both the TSI and the portion of its energy absorbed by the Earth. The Earth as a planet will henceforward have negative balance in the energy budget which will result in the temperature drop in approximately 2014. Due to increase of albedo and decrease of the greenhouse gases atmospheric concentration the absorbed portion of solar energy and the influence of the greenhouse effect It will additionally decline.

After the maximum of solar cycle 24, from approximately 2014 we can expect the start of the next bicentennial cycle of deep cooling with a Little Ice Age in 2055 plus or minus 11.

Evident that the sea ice is increasing not declining. The Arctic has stopped decreasing from the influence of the ADO-PDO oscillation. It’s just another ending of a cycle and another beginning. It’s buried in historical documents that MSS ignores.

The biggest problem with AGW reasearch is credibility. Until researchers release ALL of the raw data upon which their models are built, one can only conclude that the models and subsequent analyses are nonsense.

Nope, there’s enough data and info to show that AGW has very little effect in climate change.

And Professor Singer agrees with that:

S. Fred Singer is professor emeritus at the University of Virginia and director of the Science & Environmental Policy Project. His specialty is atmospheric and space physics.

An expert in remote sensing and satellites, he served as the founding director of the US Weather Satellite Service and, more recently, as vice chair of the US National Advisory Committee on Oceans & Atmosphere.

In 2007, he founded and chaired NIPCC (Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change). Dr. Singer is the author of numerous books including Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years (co-authored with Dennis Avery) & Climate Change Reconsidered (co-authored with Craig Idso). His most recent writings can be found at American Thinker.

Battering your critics with personal insults is not the right way to behave.

Bottom line is that the fanaticism displayed by many of the Climate Change scientists, insisting that catastrophic consequences are looming, is something that is rightfully open to logical questioning. The sceptic is at the core of scientific process, any attempt to forcibly silence the sceptic is an affront to the process, and usually a sign of cracks in the theory that one so adamantly defends. Even Newton’s theories on gravity were later displaced by General Relativity. Certainly the murky models of climate change forecasting are rightfully subject to the same level scrutiny.

The person who wrote this particular article appears to see the world in black and white, at least when it comes to this topic. Spending significant effort to silence the sceptics, the critics, and anyone else who has any doubt about what is going to happen to the climate and why it is going to happen. Indeed, it could not be worse than a world consumed by flames.

For more informed arguments, everyone who has an interest in the topic of climate change should refer to this article: